Of the two units, the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) will develop systems for exploring the Moon and Mars, and the Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD) will focus on space operations. NASA is making the changes because of increasing space operations in low-Earth orbit and development programmes well underway for deep space exploration.
Equinox comes from the Latin words equi, which means "equal" and nox, which means "night". The astronomical event is caused by Earth's tilt on its axis and its motion in orbit around the Sun. On Wednesday, the Sun will be exactly above Earth's equator, moving from north to south, making day and night nearly equal in length -- about 12 hours -- throughout the world, said US space agency NASA in a blogpost.
The Artemis rover -- Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) -- during its 100-day journey will explore the region's surface and subsurface for water and other resources, the US space agency has confirmed.
While Mars has no liquid water on its surface today, remote sensing studies and analyses of Martian meteorites dating back to the 1980s posit that Mars was once water-rich, compared to Earth
According to cosmologists, the type of dark energy might have existed in the first 3,00,000 years after the Big Bang, Nature reported. A tentative first trace of this 'early dark energy' was detected in data collected between 2013 and 2016 by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, revealing two separate studies -- posted on the arXiv preprint server, meaning not yet peer-reviewed.
The findings, posted on the virological.org discussion forum and not yet peer reviewed, may challenge the hypothesis that SARS-COV-2 escaped from a laboratory, Nature reported. The finding could be the "dagger into the heart" of the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab, rather than originating from the wildlife trade, Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in Louisiana.
