Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is making its way back up after spending nearly a year inside Victoria Crater studying exposed layers of ancient martian rock. The rover entered the 800-meter (2,624-foot) wide crater on Sept. 11, 2007, after a year of scouting from its rim. “We’ve done everything we entered Victoria Crater to do and more,” says Bruce Banerdt, project scientist for Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.
NASA has released the first image from its latest space observatory, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), and given it a new name. GLAST will now be known as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, after Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, whose pioneering work serves as the foundation for understanding many of the astrophysical phenomena the telescope will observe.
A National Research Council (NRC) panel is faulting NASA for not systematically taking astronaut health and human factors into account in the early stages of its Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP). “The committee did not find a high degree of awareness of the interdependencies between the ETDP technology projects and associated human health risks and human factor design considerations,” the panel says in its report.
