NASA fires up powerful lithium-fed thruster for trips to Mars

A technology that could propel crewed missions to Mars and robotic spacecraft throughout the solar system was recently put to the test at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. On Feb. 24, for the first ...

An interplanetary shortcut can speed up trips to Mars

Whether it's robotic rovers heading to Mars or, one day, a crew of astronauts, a round-trip journey is an incredibly long one. But there may be a way to find a shortcut. A new study published in the journal Acta Astronautica ...

Mining the solar system to build a new world

I watched Armageddon again fairly recently with Bruce Willis, oil drillers in space and an asteroid the size of Texas bearing down on Earth. Buried beneath the Hollywood chaos is a genuinely interesting question: What exactly ...

Light-powered propulsion expands space exploration possibilities

Reaching the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, would take hundreds of thousands of years using current rocket propulsion technology. Researchers in the J. Mike Walker '66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M ...

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