Items tagged with space
A group of physicists designed a first-of-its-kind experiment to simulate what might happen if a nuclear bomb was detonated near an asteroid approaching Earth. The experiment recorded in nanosecond detail how a very large pulse of radiation from a nuclear blast could essentially vaporize the side of an approaching...
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NASA’s Webb telescope tells an elliptical and spiral galaxy to say “Cheese!” The image is a composite of images, combining observations from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) of a pair of galaxies collectively known as Arp 107.
The pair of galaxies, located 465 million...
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Astronomers have detected the largest pair of black hole jets ever seen. The pair spans 23-million light-years, or the equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back.
According to NASA, supermassive black holes are millions to tens of billions times the mass of the Sun. A census using the Hubble Space...
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Researchers have come across some evidence suggesting Earth had a ring system around 466 million years ago, which may have been a contributor to the global cooling event known as the Hirnantian Icehouse. The hypothesis comes from plate tectonic reconstructions for the Ordovician period, a period of unusually intense...
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ATLAS, an asteroid impact early warning system in Hawaii, spotted a small asteroid that will temporarily orbit Earth for the next two months. Asteroid 2024 PT5 is a 10-meter (33-feet) wide space rock that is expected to come as close as 1 million kilometers of Earth in an orbital path that resembles a...
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The month of September is chock full of celestial goodness, with a partial lunar eclipse highlighting the festivities. September’s full moon, also called the Harvest moon, will also be a Supermoon, meaning it will appear ever so slightly bigger and brighter than the average full moon.
As NASA and the US government...
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As space exploration aims to go further than ever before, space agencies and companies are looking at new ways to sustain longer duration space flights, as well as on other planetary bodies. A collaboration between Airbus, Cranfield University, and the European Space Agency (ESA) brought about the first metal 3D...
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As NASA and other space agencies continue working toward sedning humans back to the moon, the agency’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program is leading efforts to create a coordinated lunar time standard. The goal is to enable a future lunar ecosystem that could be scalable to other locations in our solar...
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SpaceX has performed the first private spacewalk during the Polaris Dawn mission, viewing Earth 458 miles below. Crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis took turns floating just outside the Dragon capsule while wearing specially-designed suits.
After having its launch delayed due to the FAA grounding all...
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Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft made a successful return to Earth over the weekend, but not without some additional issues being found. While NASA reported astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams would have been safe on the spacecraft, it also reported a thruster had failed during Starliner’s decent.
Issues with...
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Hubble may be the older sibling to the more advanced James Webb Space Telescope, but it is still being used to help solve the riddles and mysteries of the universe. Now, along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the iconic space telescope unexpectedly unveiled a duo of supermassive black holes within a pair of...
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NASA and Boeing are preparing to bring the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth, albeit uncrewed. Starliner will depart from the International Space Station (ISS) later today for a rendezvous back on Earth at one of several possible landing sites.
Early in the mission, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams...
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A Kobe University researcher has confirmed that an asteroid which struck Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was about 20 times larger than the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs on Earth. According to the new study, when the asteroid struck Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, its axis shifted because of the...
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“Houston. I have a question about Starliner,” is what Butch Wilmore radioed ground control this past Saturday after hearing a “strange noise coming through the speaker.” The report from Wilmore comes just days ahead of the spacecraft’s scheduled departure from the International Space Station (ISS) without any crew...
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NASA Meteor Watch confirmed what many across nearly a dozen states saw and heard in the early morning hours of August 30 was indeed a meteor. The space agency added the meteor event began about 45 miles above Piney Flats, Tennessee, and moved south and eastward at a breakneck speed of 31,300 miles per hour.
The...
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Intuitive Machines will receive $116.9 million to deliver six NASA payloads to the Moon’s South Pole in 2027. The new set of science experiments and technology demonstrations are part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, including support for missions with crew on the lunar surface.
The lunar...
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The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has grounded all SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets following an incident where a booster rocket burst into flames shortly after landing atop a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, delaying the historic launch of the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission. The incident comes on the heels of a rocket...
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While the James Webb Space Telescope has been solving the Universe's riddles in the last couple of years, Hubble continues to prove its value. One recent example was a new image comprising more than 500 images from Hubble spanning two decades of the innermost region of Omega Centauri, providing new evidence for the...
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While the James Webb Space Telescope continues to amaze with its images of deep space, a new study finds it is not “breaking” the Universe in at least one way, with its enlightening discoveries. What do we mean by "breaking?" Scientists and astronomers were expecting to find galactic pipsqueaks in Webb’s early images...
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Boeing employees are reportedly feeling “humiliated” after NASA decided to return Starliner crew aboard rival SpaceX's Dragon capsule in February 2025. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams had been waiting on a decision about how and when they would return home since their arrival at the International Space...
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German start-up Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) watched as one of its rocket engines exploded during a nine-engine test at Britain’s new spaceport in Shetland. The company hopes to launch the UK’s first-ever vertical rocket into orbit.
While it may at times seem easy to launch rockets into space given the regularity...
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Space mining company AstroForge has raised $40 million toward the first-ever private asteroid mining mission in 2025. The $40 million Series A funding round brings the total raised to date to $55 million, with investors representing what the company calls “some of the most forward-thinking and innovative folks in...
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