Items tagged with space
SpaceX has confirmed an orbital anomaly involving a Starlink satellite that fragmented into dozens of pieces, raising fresh concerns about space debris even as the company maintains that the event poses no threat to major upcoming missions...
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Heads up sky-gazers, fireball season is upon us! That's according to NASA, which notes that we're now in peak fireball season, a time period that typically runs from February through April. During that time, exceptionally bright meteor...
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As the spring air turns crisp, the evening of April 1 will host the first major celestial event of the season. On Wednesday, the Pink Moon will reach peak illumination at 10:12 p.m. EDT, serving as a traditional herald of the changing...
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Hubble has captured a phenomenon never before witnessed in the world of astronomy: a comet that slowed and then began spinning in the opposite direction. No alien intervention was involved in this one (as far as we...
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NASA’s top-dog telescopes, Hubble and Webb, have just released a never-before-seen collaborative portrait of Saturn. By combining Hubble’s visible-light vision with Webb’s infrared superpowers, astronomers have captured the gas giant in a...
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In a broad reorganization of the United States' lunar ambitions, NASA has effectively canceled Lunar Gateway, the planned space station that was to orbit the moon, in favor of a $20 billion permanent surface base. Furthermore, plans for a...
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New data from NASA’s almost-retired Juno orbiter has revealed that lightning bolts on Jupiter are significantly more powerful than previously thought, frequently discharging over 100 times the energy of a typical flash on Earth.
While...
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Rock sample analysis from the asteroids Ryugu and Bennu (collected in 2018) has confirmed that the entire library of the chemical code for DNA and RNA exists in space.
The space-delivery theory for life’s origins has been missing...
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Looks like we have a new entrant to the orbital data center race: Blue Origin is formally challenging the likes of SpaceX and Axiom with plans for an initial constellation of tens of thousands of satellites.
Filing plans with the...
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A 7-ton asteroid roughly the size of a storage shed was spotted streaking across the Northeast Ohio sky at 45,000 mph, detonating over Medina County with the force of 250 tons of TNT. This event didn't just rattle windows from Cleveland to...
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A team of astronomers led by the University of Oxford has identified a new class of liquid planet, a world defined not by oceans of water, but by a global reservoir of molten magma thousands of miles deep and a volatile atmosphere.
The...
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Astronomers have just discovered TOI-1080 b, a rocky super-Earth located approximately 83 light-years away. Spearheaded by a team from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, follow-up monitoring could reveal even more planets around...
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Comet 3I/ATLAS has once again found its way into headlines as astronomers are astounded to learn the famous space rock is emitting large amounts of organic methanol in its coma. The group of astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, also known as ALMA, to make the discovery.
Late...
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A bright meteoric fireball streaked across the European sky this week, providing a rare and dramatic six-second-long display for onlookers with their phones and cameras. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), however, at least one...
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Back in 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully smashed a spacecraft into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, a kinetic impact experiment to see if we could knock a lethal space rock off course. New analysis this week...
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NASA has announced that the asteroid known as 2024 YR4, a space rock roughly the size of a 20-story building, no longer poses a threat of crashing into the Moon during its close approach in 2032. While initial projections suggested a slim...
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By merging the razor focus of the Hubble Space Telescope with the wide-field perspective of the Euclid mission, two of the world’s most powerful space telescopes have captured a new look at the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the famous sprawling...
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Tonight, as well as into early tomorrow morning, a total lunar eclipse will sweep across the globe, plunging the full Moon into the Earth’s shadow for nearly an hour. Visible to over 3 billion people across the Americas, East Asia, and...
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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unveiled a striking new photo of the "Exposed Cranium" Nebula, a celestial structure that, as the nickname implies, bears a strong resemblance to a human brain encased in a translucent...
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Astronomers have captured the largest and most detailed image of the Milky Way’s core to date, revealing a chaotic web of cosmic filaments at our galaxy's center. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a...
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The ground at Kennedy Space Center began to hum yesterday evening as the crawler-transporter lurched into motion, beginning the slow, four-mile journey to return the Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft to the...
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NASA’s Curiosity rover has finally completed its focused survey of the so-called spiderwebs of Mars, providing us the first close-up look at a massive network of geologic ridges on Mount Sharp that have puzzled scientists since they were...
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