Mark is based in Houston, where he has written on aerospace for more than 25 years. While at the Houston Chronicle, he was recognized by the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement Foundation in 2006 for his professional contributions to the public understanding of America's space program through news reporting. He has written on U. S. space policy as well as NASA's human and space science initiatives.
Mark was recognized by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors and Headliners Foundation as well as the Chronicle in 2004 for news coverage of the shuttle Columbia tragedy and its aftermath.
He is a graduate of the University of Kansas and holds a Master's degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from Kansas State University.
The U.S.-led mission to collect samples from asteroid Bennu could also provide valuable information about the possibility that an asteroid collision could wipe out life on the planet.
NASA ground controllers overcame an unexpected obstruction as they issued commands to the International Space Station’s robot arm late Aug. 17 and early Aug. 18 to extract the first docking assembly for use by future U.S. commercial crew spacecraft from a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule and reposition the hardware at the front of the orbiting science lab.
OSIRIS-REx—the first U.S.-led mission to attempt a roundtrip to an asteroid for the collection of a small sample of surface materials—promises to pay dividends for planetary defense advocates as well as scientists eager for clues to the origins of life on Earth
