On January 3rd, 2019, India will launch its second lunar mission to the moon with a lander and a rover, according to a top space official on Sunday.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K Sivan told reporters in Bengaluru that their goal is to launch the mission on January 3, 2019, but the window to land on the lunar surface is open till March 2019.

The Rs 800-crore lunar mission named “Chandrayaan-2” comes more than ten years after India went up to the lunar orbit on November 8, 2008, with the “Chandrayaan-1” launch on October 22 onboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket from the spaceport in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.

Meanwhile, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been observing the skies in high-energy light since 1999

However, on October 10th, an unruly orientation-maintaining gyroscope sent Chandra into a protective "safe mode." Fortunately, according to mission team members on October 19th, that problem is almost solved, and the NASA space telescope remains on track to return to action next week.

Using the Chandra Twitter account, @chandraxay, team members announced that the Flight Operations Team had finished testing and simulation of the procedures and onboard software updates that will place Chandra into a new gyroscope configuration, with the gyroscope that caused the Oct. 10 safe mode in reserve.

The team also stated that the switch was set to take place on Friday, October 20th and will be followed by a period of gathering maneuver data to confirm and calibrate the new configuration before resuming science observing, which should start this week.

Moreover, the large Stratolaunch aircraft just reached a new milestone after completing low-speed taxi testing earlier in 2018. Now the Stratolaunch has reached 90 mph (145 km/h) during its most recent stage of runway testing. A development that comes days after billionaire co-founder of the company Paul Allen passed away, only months before his long-thought-out creation finally fly.

These medium-speed runway tests are essential for deploying the Stratolaunch into the air. It's hoped the Stratolaunch will make its maiden flight within the next year to year and a half. Unfortunately, Paul G Allen the founder of Stratolaunch passed away just days after this latest accomplishment.

The giant dual-fuselage Stratolaunch, which has been in production since 2011, is a massively ambitious engineering challenge. Built to be the first commercial air-launch vehicle able to send relatively small payloads into a variety of Earth orbits, the world's largest plane has passed a series of important milestones over the years.

Lastly, once you send humans to the red planet, they either have what they need to survive, or they die. A risk that was dramatically portrayed in the sci-fi book and movie "The Martian," where a stranded astronaut survives on leftover potatoes, freeze-dried feces, and a lot of ingenuity.

Thus, a new startup rocket company called Relativity Space, which is being backed by Mark Cuban, sees a vital opening for business in this realm.

Tim Ellis, a co-founder of Relativity Space, told Business Insider that they feel it's inevitable that if humanity is going to colonize space, 3D-printing is the only way to manufacture things such as tools and replacement parts. Ellis is a rocket-propulsion engineer who formerly worked at Blue Origin.

Ellis explained that it inspired him to see 3D-printing as the future of rockets. Adding that in this entirely new process they saw how much time was saved when building rockets.

The type of 3D-printing Ellis is referring to is known as laser sintering. The system uses laser beams to bond powdered metal, layer by layer, into precise and complex structures that have minimal parts.

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