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''Landing on the Red Planet is one of the biggest challenges in spaceflight, so hard that the problem is referred as the Great Galactic Ghoul.''

''NASA's Journey to Mars might be officially dead. That is, the agency doesn't seem likely to land an astronaut on the Red Planet in the 2030s, and NASA's associate administrator for human exploration, William H. Gerstenmaier, recently said that NASA does not have the funding for a crewed Mars mission in the current timeline. Gerstenmaier also addressed the underlying problem: The agency just doesn't know how to land something as heavy as a crewed spacecraft on Mars.''

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/news/a27304/nasa-wont-put-astronaut-on-mars-2030s/

''A new telescope in La Palma, in Spain's Canary Islands, coordinates with gravitational-wave detectors to track down optical signals of the colossal collisions that cause them.

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), built as an international collaboration led by the U.K.'s University of Warwick and Australia's Monash University, was officially inaugurated July 3.

The ripples in space-time called gravitational waves can be detected on Earth when they're created by extremely large-scale events in the universe — like when two ultradense neutron stars or black holes orbit each other and merge. (Massive stellar explosions called supernovas can also cause detectable gravitational waves.) The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) first detected distortion caused by those waves in 2016. [ 'We Don't Planet' Episode 8: Gravitational Waves ]''

https://www.space.com/37412-optical-telescope-gravitational-wave-sources.html

''The frigid, faraway body that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will zoom by 18 months from now may actually be a cluster of small objects, new observations suggest.

New Horizons — which performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015 — will have another close encounter on Jan. 1, 2019, this time with a little-studied object called 2014 MU69.

The frigid, faraway body that NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will zoom by 18 months from now may actually be a cluster of small objects, new observations suggest. New Horizons — which performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015 — will have another close encounter on Jan. 1, 2019, this time with a little-studied object called 2014 MU69. ''

https://www.space.com/37415-new-horizons-second-flyby-target-surprises.html

''The Martian surface may be even less hospitable to life than scientists had thought.

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation streaming from the sun "activates" chlorine compounds in the Red Planet's soil, turning them into potent microbe-killers, a new study suggests.

The Martian surface may be even less hospitable to life than scientists had thought. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation streaming from the sun "activates" chlorine compounds in the Red Planet's soil, turning them into potent microbe-killers, a new study suggests.''

https://www.space.com/37402-mars-life-soil-toxic-perchlorates-radiation.html

''The speediest stars zipping through the Milky Way galaxy are runaways from a small neighboring galaxy, according to a new study.

Scientists said they suspect that around 10,000 of these so-called "hypervelocity" stars in the Milky Way were born in a small satellite galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. Each of those stars was once half of a binary star system , in which two stars orbit one another. But explosive breakups sent the stars flying away so fast that they escaped the gravitational pull of their home galaxy and ventured off into the Milky Way, the study suggests.''

https://www.space.com/37389-fastest-runaway-stars.html

''Just how clean are spacecraft clean rooms ? Turns out, they have some dirty little secrets.

As multiple nations lob spacecraft to Mars, there's always the concern that Red Planet-bound vehicles might provide a free ride to organic material and microbes. That material could pollute a place that is otherwise thought to be biologically immaculate.

Moreover, unintentional inoculation of Mars with Earthly microorganisms or other contaminants could imperil the scientific validity of spotting a true Martian biosignature, because scientists would have to distinguish it from an organism that was transported from Earth. [ 5 Bold Claims of Alien Life ]''

https://www.space.com/37392-spacecraft-clean-rooms-not-so-clean.html

''For the first time ever, scientists have directly spotted a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other, a new study suggests.

This orbital motion — which was noted in observations made over the course of a dozen years — may be the smallest-ever movement detected of an object across the sky , the researchers said.''

https://www.space.com/37369-supermassive-black-holes-orbiting-each-other.html

''Earth gets farther from the sun today (July 3) than it does at any other point during the year.

The moment of greatest separation, known as aphelion, comes at 4:11 p.m. EDT (2011 GMT) today, when Earth and the sun will be 94,505,901 miles (152,092,505 kilometers) apart.''

https://www.space.com/37371-earth-farthest-from-sun-today-aphelion.html

''As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet’s surface for fuel production, habitats and other equipment. One option: small nuclear fission reactors, which work by splitting uranium atoms to generate heat, which is then converted into electric power. ''

https://www.space.com/37348-nasa-fission-power-mars-colony.html

''In the first of three launches scheduled worldwide Friday, ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle has conducted its fortieth launch, deploying a Cartosat-2 Earth imaging spacecraft and a host of small satellites. Liftoff from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India was on schedule at 09:29 local time (03:59 UTC).''

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/06/pslv-rocket-cartosat-2e-30-small-sats/

NASA's new compact high-power solar array made its debut on the International Space Station Sunday (June 18), allowing astronauts to test the technology's durability for deep-space missions.  - See more at: https://www.space.com/37250-roll-out-solar-arrays-on-space-station.html#sthash.pA54zD3E.dpuf

These could be handy at Asgardia's Space Station as well.

NASA on Monday (June 19) unveiled the complete set of data from the first four years of the agency's Kepler Space Telescope mission, which stared at a single patch of the sky in the search for alien planets. The result: Kepler has discovered 219 new alien candidates since NASA's last data unveiling, including 10 near-Earth-size planets in the so-called "Goldilocks" zone around their stars where the conditions are just right for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface - a key feature in the search for habitable worlds.

https://www.space.com/37242-nasa-kepler-alien-planets-habitable-worlds-catalog.html

NASA will announce the latest crop of planet discoveries from the Kepler Space Telescope during a briefing Monday morning (June 19).

The briefing will be at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) during the Kepler Science Conference at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. You can watch the exoplanet announcement here , courtesy of NASA TV. NASA will livestream the conference here: http://www.nasa.gov/live .

https://www.space.com/37227-nasa-exoplanets-announcement-coming-june-19.html

I value all science and I think that humankind should invest more in space exploring and prepare for a day that we're on a course to collide with an asteroid or something. Every time when humans work to develop means to deal with an issue of some kind we come up with solutions to other problems as well, so it's never an wasted effort even if the one thing we're trying to do would work out for us.

Many illnesses could be medicated and cured if we would invest more for projects that try to find an solution.

The money humankind uses to learn more from universe does bring progress down on earth as well. So in a way we all benefit from it one way or another.

I joined Asgardia because I want to make the world a better place. I believe in science and equal opportunities for women and men.