NASA's Scarab Prototype in Testing

NASA’s Lunar rover prototype, Scarab, is designed to carry a drill and do exploratory drilling on the Moon. The rover is specially designed for the Moon’s surface and includes sophisticated tires designed to operate on the (pressure-less) Lunar surface and achieve high traction.

The drill can take samples of the Moons surface up to about one meter in depth. Once the sample is drilled, the rover crushes the sample and tests it with on-board lab equipment to determine how good the site may be for a future Moon base. The samples are tested for minerals as well as gases.

Watch this interesting video about Scarab’s mission and how it was designed.

Orbital Express Satellite

A retired Russian General has claimed the ‘accidental crash’ between a Russian and US Iridium communications satellite was no accident. According to Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Leonid Shershnev, former head of Russian military space intelligence, the crash may really be a conspiracy – a US ploy to test the feasibility of controlling or disabling hostile satellites.  Source: Official Russian State-owned  News  and Information Agency – RIAN

You may have heard about this supposed “test” already (Above at RIAN, HERE on robots.net, and many other places on the ‘net I’m too lazy to link to). If not, you’ve probably at least heard that two satellites collided, leaving a ton of dangerous debris.

Does anyone else question the credibility of a Russian General (ret.) talking about a US conspiracy to take out foreign satellites in the State-owned Russian news agency? If you don’t, you probably should. This sounds like nothing but Russian propaganda, to me. For the hearing impared, it smells and looks like it, too.

Sure, a loosely related DARPA program may have existed, but let’s not take their state-owned word for it when they say the program’s purpose was to go out and destroy other satellites.

We’d probably never know for sure if it really was a secret US Military test. Remember,  just because the odds were long doesn’t make it impossible. It makes it unlikely. Sometimes unlikely things happen.

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