Items tagged with space
If you've seen photos of the far side of the moon, specifically of two long canyons within what is called the Schrödinger basin and wondered what created them, look no further—researches have determined that ejecta from an ancient asteroid strike carved out the grand canyons (Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck) in...
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Almost by accident, a researcher stumbled upon a unique galactic event 50 million years in the making. Apparently NASA's Hubble Space Telescope had captured a ringed galaxy (LEDA 1313424) that not only heavily resembles a bullseye, but with nine (perhaps more) rings now holds the record for the most rings observed in...
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As a part of its grand plans for outer space domination, China intends on sending another Chang'e probe into space next year. The mission this time is to search for water potentially frozen in the far side of the moon after previous Chinese probes had found potential for further exploration. Discovering frozen water...
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Stargazers are in for a rare planetary treat from now until the end of February. If you look up into the night sky tonight (under the right conditions, of course), six planets—Jupiter, Mars, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus, and Venus—will be visible. Even better is that on February 28, Mercury will join the rather special...
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If things had gone to plan in the wee hours of the morning today, Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin team would be celebrating the successful liftoff of the company's towering New Glenn rocket. Instead, celebrations will have to wait for another day after pesky issues ultimately kept the 30-story rocket grounded at the...
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On Tuesday, January 7th, 2025, NASA announced an update to its Mars Sample Return (MSR) Program, created to help scientists understand the Red Planet by bringing home Martian rock samples. The agency is now torn between two plans for bringing the samples back to Earth: recreating a previous rocket method or getting a...
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Talk about a close call! A large metal ring suspected to be space debris, measuring around 8 feet wide and weighing a hefty 1,100 pounds, crashed in a village in Kenya earlier this week. Preliminary evaluations point to a separation ring from a rocket, but an investigation is still pending by the Kenya Space Agency...
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A new research has revealed that sun-like stars in our galaxy experience one violent "superflare" approximately once every hundred years—far more often that scientists previously thought. With that, many believe that the Sun in our solar system is overdue for such a superflare, especially since the last one was back...
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Grab a warm blanket, lawn chair, some hot cocoa, and get ready for one of the most dazzling meteor showers of the year. The colorful Geminid meteor light show is expected to peak tonight as well as tomorrow night with up to 160 meteors per hour (with the right conditions, of course). Bonus: the Geminids usually occur...
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It's not too often that you see an accident report for a vehicle on another planet, but such is the case with NASA providing some preliminary details from "the first aircraft accident investigation on another world." The first by NASA, anyway, as who knows if some intelligent beings on a distant planet or solar system...
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A former NASA engineer turned YouTuber has found a round-a-bout way to give people the opportunity to snap a selfie of themselves from space. The satellite will also send an alert to a person when it is above their location on Earth, making it possible to photobomb themselves in their own selfie from space.
Mark...
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European space companies Airbus, Thales, and Leonardo have joined forces to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink in the growing space-based internet race. Until the recent announcement of the joint venture, named Project Bromo, the satellite makers had only hinted that they were looking at working with one...
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Researchers from the Curtain node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have tracked down a possible explanation for the rare astrophysical event known as long-period radio transients. Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker, and Csanad Horvath, an undergraduate student at the time...
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Who doesn’t associate the roaring, and crackling sound of rocket engines with Christmas these days? For those who may, or may not, NASA wants to kick off the Christmas season with a warm and cozy 8 hour 4K fireplace video. The space agency does point out that technically the fireplace packs the heat of the SLS...
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Jupiter is well-known for its Great Red Spot, but astronomers have recently discovered equally large spots at the giant gas planet’s north and south poles that appear and disappear at random. The dark UV ovals were first spotted by NASA’s Hubble spacecraft in the late 1990s, but have only recently been studied in...
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A new image of the Sombrero galaxy from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has astronomers taking their hats off in place of a cosmic bullseye. The galaxy, known as Messier 104 (M104), was discovered in 1781 by French astronomer and comet hunter Pierre Mechain, one of Charles Messier’s colleagues.
In Webb’s image of...
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Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO’s VLTI) took the first close-up image of a dying star outside of the Milky Way. The newly imaged star, WH G64, is located within the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the smaller galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.
While the...
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The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter grabbed the highest-resolution full views of the Sun’s visible surface to date. The images were assembled using observations from the spacecraft’s PHI and EUI instruments on March 22, 2023.
The observations used to stitch together the new high-resolution images were...
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A group of USC Viterbi School of Engineering students have broken the international altitude record for a rocket, reaching further into space than any non-governmental and non-commercial group have ever flown before. The previous record of 380,000 feet stood for 20 years, before falling to the student-run group USC...
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Chinese researchers have had their first look at rock samples brought back from the far side of the Moon by its Chang’e-6 mission. The mission was China’s second excursion to the Moon’s far side, after the Chang’e-4 mission in 2019.
The Chang’e-6 spacecraft landed on the Moon’s far side in June of this year, touching...
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SpaceX’s Starship megarocket is prepped and ready for a possible sixth test flight this week. During the fifth test flight, the space company was able to achieve the first-ever booster rocket catch via chopstick arms of the mammoth Mechzilla tower.
The spectacular first catch of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster rocket...
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The Leonid meteor shower is set to peak this weekend, sending shooting stars dashing across the night sky. The Leonids are well-known for their high-speed meteors, which can travel up to 44 miles per second.
November has been full of celestial delights already, with a Beaver supermoon, planetary views of Saturn...
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