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Dec. 9, 2021 -- Something strange is happening to skywatchers' most anticipated comet of the year.
Astronomers first spotted what's been dubbed Comet Leonard in January 2021, and soon skywatchers were eagerly anticipating December and January, when the comet was due to pass by first Earth, then the sun.
But by late November, observers noticed something strange. The comet should be getting brighter as it approaches the sun — and it is, but apparently only because it's getting closer to Earth, not because it's becoming inherently brighter. Instead, it seems to be fading...
Dec. 9, 2021 -- NASA’s newest X-ray observatory rocketed into orbit Thursday to shed light on exploded stars, black holes and other violent high-energy events unfolding in the universe.
SpaceX launched the spacecraft on its $188 million mission from Kennedy Space Center. It’s called IXPE, short for Imaging X-ray Polarization Explorer.
Scientists said the observatory — actually three telescopes in one — will unveil the most dramatic and extreme parts of the universe as never before...
Dec. 9, 2021 -- Astronomers have discovered a massive exoplanet orbiting around the binary star system b Centauri.
The two stars are so hot and huge that researchers previously thought that no planet could exist around them.
B Centauri sits in the Centaurus constellation, some 325 light-years outside of our solar system. Its main star is more than three times hotter than our sun, and its two stars have a combined weight of roughly 6 to 10 suns. Until now, no planet has been found orbiting stars more than three times our sun’s mass...
Dec. 9, 2021 -- A volcanic peak standing more than a mile high on Venus may still be active, new findings show, possibly shedding light on hotly debated findings that suggest that life may exist on the hellish planet.
Venus has more volcanoes than any other planet in our solar system. Previous research suggests that Venus possesses more than 1,600 major volcanoes, and could have more than 100,000 or even more than 1 million smaller volcanoes.
However, it has been hotly debated whether any remain active today, as the planet's extreme surface pressure and temperatures make it difficult for surface probes to last very long (if at all) on Venus, and its thick clouds of sulfuric acid limit analysis of its surface from space...
Dec. 9, 2021 -- Astronomers were surprised to find a galaxy that lacks an invisible but essential piece—dark matter.
Dark matter, the mysterious theoretical substance that makes up 27 percent of our universe and doesn’t emit light, exerts a gravitational pull on regular matter.
In scientists’ current picture of how a galaxy is born, dark matter is essential because it’s pull creates a base that galaxies form on...
Dec. 8, 2021 -- On Wednesday, Earth observation startup Planet celebrated its debut on the New York Stock Exchange — a move that a company executive tells Breaking Defense has Planet awash with cash and looking for ways to invest in new capabilities.
The firm’s big financial shift came on the heels of another potentially significant move: its government arm, Planet Federal, on Dec. 6 submitted a proposal for a major National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) electro-optical imagery contract, Robbie Shingler, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the San Francisco-based firm, told Breaking Defense today...
Dec. 8, 2021 -- A Soyuz spacecraft launched Dec. 8 carrying two Japanese private astronauts and a Roscosmos cosmonaut on the first flight in more than a decade for space tourism company Space Adventures.
A Soyuz-2.1a rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2:38 a.m. Eastern, placing the Soyuz MS-20 into orbit nine minutes later.
The spacecraft is docked with the Poisk module of the International Space Station at 8:40 a.m. Eastern...
Dec. 6, 2021 -- There’s something strange about the dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way.
These smaller galaxies orbit our own, but many of their orbits align along what astronomers term the vast polar structure: a pancake-shaped plane that intersects our own crepe-thin galaxy.
Out of the dozens of known satellites in the Milky Way’s retinue, about half of them, maybe even more, belong to this structure, dotting the plane like raisins in the pancake. What’s more this pancake rotates, the blueberries whirling around the Milky Way in the same direction...
Dec. 3, 2021 -- The International Space Station dodged a fragment of a decades-old rocket body early Friday morning, continuing a stretch of space debris threats to the orbiting laboratory.
On Friday (Dec. 3) at around 3 a.m. EST (0800 GMT), a Russian cargo ship docked to the International Space Station fired for a little under three minutes to lower the facility's orbit and ensure that it would pass safely by the debris, according to statements from NASA and its Russian counterpart, Roscosmos.
In a tweet posted on Wednesday (Dec. 1), Roscosmos flagged the risk posed by the rocket fragment, which it said was estimated to pass as close as 3.4 miles (5.4 kilometers) to the space station...
Dec. 3, 2021 -- NASA issued awards Dec. 2 valued at more than $400 million to three groups of companies to advance development of commercial space stations, keeping those efforts on track to succeed the International Space Station by the end of the decade despite skepticism from the agency’s inspector general.
NASA announced three funded Space Act Agreements as part of its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program, an initiative to support work on commercial stations that the agency hopes to have in place by late this decade, allowing it to transition from the ISS.
The awards will allow the winning companies to mature the designs of their proposed stations through 2025...
Dec. 3, 2021 -- A team of astronomers used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to find an exoplanet so close to its star, its surface could be molten.
This “ultrashort-period” planet has a tight orbit, with a year lasting only eight hours—alien birthday parties there would accumulate so fast they’d get very tedious.
The exoplanet, called GJ 367b, is three-quarters the width of Earth, falling into the elusive category of sub-Earth...
Dec. 2, 2021 -- Astronomers have identified and weighed the nearest dual supermassive black hole, in a galaxy just 89 million light-years away. In the future, the pair will collide, releasing powerful gravitational waves.
Three years ago, a team led by François Schweizer (Carnegie Observatories) reported a compact, bluish concentration of stars just off of the bright center of NGC 7727, a somewhat distorted galaxy in the constellation Aquarius.
This “second nucleus” turned out to produce faint X-rays, leading Schweizer and his colleagues to suggest that it might be the stripped core of a smaller galaxy with a mildly active central black hole that merged with NGC 7727 some 2 billion years ago...
Nov. 14, 2021 -- China is building a specially designed ship for launching rockets into space from the seas in an effort to boost its capacity to launch satellites and recover rocket stages.
The 533 feet (162.5 meters) long, 131 feet (40 meters) wide "New-type rocket launching vessel" is being constructed for use with the new China Oriental Spaceport at Haiyang, Shandong province on the Eastern coast.
The new ship is expected to enter service in 2022. It will feature integrated launch support equipment and be capable of facilitating launches of the Long March 11, larger commercial "Smart Dragon" rockets and, in the future, liquid propellant rockets, according to the social media channel for the spaceport. ..
Nov. 14, 2021 -- Hard to believe it was just 50 years ago today. Time flies when you’re exploring your solar system for the first time.
As a space-obsessed 11-year-old, I was riveted by the drama of Mariner 9. On November 14, 1971, two years after humans first set foot on the Moon, the spacecraft arrived at Mars — a world still almost completely unknown, and completely misunderstood.
One could argue that this was the moment we first became a multi-planet species...
Nov. 13, 2021 -- SpaceX expanded its constellation of low Earth orbit satellites on Saturday with the launch of 53 Starlink satellites from Florida.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:19 a.m. EST and deployed the satellites about 16 minutes after launch.
The rocket’s reusable first stage, which has been used for multiple launches, including the first crewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, successfully returned and landed on the “Just Read the Instructions” droneship in the Atlantic Ocean...
Nov. 13, 2021 -- Jupiter has been taking a beating lately.
In September and October, observers spotted two different asteroids slamming into the massive planet just a month apart.
While it’s not the first time observers have caught such a spectacle, successfully spotting an impact is fairly rare, and can tell us more about the solar system as a whole. And there’s the thrill of knowing a piece of the universe has just exploded in the atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet...
Nov. 12, 2021 -- For more than 50 years, Snoopy has contributed to the excitement for NASA human spaceflight missions, helping inspire generations to dream big.
NASA has shared an association with Charles M. Schulz and Snoopy since Apollo missions and continues under Artemis with new educational activities. Up next -- Snoopy will ride along as the zero gravity indicator on Artemis I.
Artemis I is an uncrewed flight test of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft around the Moon launching in early 2022 before missions with astronauts...
Nov. 12, 2021 -- Ten companies and organizations from across the space industry have vowed to devise concrete measures for reducing the amount of in-orbit debris by 2030.
French satellite fleet operator Eutelsat, launch service provider Arianespace and U.S.-based Earth imagery venture Planet are among signatories of the Net Zero Space charter, which was launched Nov. 12 during the Paris Peace Forum in France.
“There are about 4,700 operational satellites currently in orbit, and this number could rise to more than 25,000 by the end of the decade,” Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël said in a statement...
Nov. 11, 2021 -- The telescope Galileo Galilei first pointed at the heavens in 1609 had a lens no wider than a slice of cucumber. Yet with that modest tool, he saw the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter—and sparked a scientific revolution that toppled Earth as the center of the cosmos.
Astronomy has come a long way since then. But when the James Webb Space Telescope launches in December, with a 6.5-meter mirror that would tower over Galileo himself, it will open views of the universe’s first stars and galaxies, probe the atmospheres of planets around other stars—and launch another revolution.
“James Webb will blow the lid off everything,” says exoplanet hunter Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter...
Nov. 11, 2021 -- The Missile Defense Agency’s race to develop new sensors capable of tracking hypersonic missiles from space is close to ticking off a key milestone, with both contractors expected to begin “bending the metal” at the end of this month, according to agency and company officials.
“We are on track for on-orbit prototype demonstrations with two space vehicles in 2023,” Mark Wright, agency spokesperson, told Breaking Defense Wednesday.
“We are on track for on-orbit prototype demonstrations with two space vehicles in 2023,” Mark Wright, agency spokesperson, told Breaking Defense Wednesday...
Nov. 11, 2021 -- The spacecraft carrying ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and his NASA astronaut colleagues Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron docked to the International Space Station at 00:32 CET Friday, 12 November (23:32 GMT Thursday, 11 November), marking the official start of Matthias's first mission ‘Cosmic Kiss’.
The four Crew-3 astronauts were launched in a new SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, called Endurance, atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA at 02:03 GMT/03:03 CET Thursday 11 November. They arrived at the Station around 22 hours later for a six-month stay in orbit...
Oct. 16, 2021 -- NASA's newest asteroid probe, named Lucy, blasted off from Kennedy Space Center here in Florida to embark on a 12-year mission to study two different clusters of asteroids around Jupiter known as Trojans.
These swarms represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. Lucy, acting as a robotic archaeologist, will help to answer questions about how the giant planets formed.
Perched atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket, the refrigerator-sized spacecraft lit up the predawn skies above Cape Canaveral as it leapt off its launch pad right on time at 5:34 a.m. EDT (0934 GMT) Saturday morning (Oct. 16). Just under two hours after launch, NASA confirmed Lucy's solar arrays had deployed and it had successfully phoned home...
Oct. 16, 2021 -- Chinese astronauts began Saturday their six-month mission on China’s first permanent space station, after successfully docking aboard their spacecraft.
The astronauts, two men and a woman, were seen floating around the module before speaking via a live-streamed video.
The new crew includes Wang Yaping, 41, who is the first Chinese woman to board the Tiangong space station, and is expected to become China’s first female spacewalker...
Oct. 15, 2021 -- In the early solar system, a “protoplanetary disk” of dust and gas rotated around the sun and eventually coalesced into the planets we know today.
A new analysis of ancient meteorites by scientists at MIT and elsewhere suggests that a mysterious gap existed within this disk around 4.567 billion years ago, near the location where the asteroid belt resides today.
The team’s results, appearing today in Science Advances, provide direct evidence for this gap...
Oct. 15, 2021 -- Asteroids embody the story of our solar system’s beginning. Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun on the same path as the gas giant, are no exception.
The Trojans are thought to be left over from the objects that eventually formed our planets, and studying them might offer clues about how the solar system came to be.
Over the next 12 years, NASA’s Lucy mission will visit eight asteroids — including seven Trojans — to help answer big questions about planet formation and the origins of our solar system. It will take the spacecraft about three and a half years to reach its first destination. What might Lucy find?
Oct. 14, 2021 -- It may have taken two tries to make the Moon.
Scientists have long thought that the Moon formed with a bang, when a protoplanet the size of Mars hit the newborn Earth. Evidence from Moon rocks and simulations back up this idea.
But a new study suggests that the protoplanet most likely hit Earth twice. The first time, the impactor (dubbed "Theia") only glanced off Earth. Then, some hundreds of thousands of years later, it came back to deliver the final blow...
Oct. 8, 2021 -- Days after news broke that William Shatner would reach space with Blue Origin on Oct. 12, the "Star Trek" actor admitted that he's experiencing some pre-flight jitters.
During a panel on Thursday evening (Oct. 7) at New York Comic Con, Shatner shared his feelings ahead of the Blue Origin mission and talked about the importance of civilian space initiatives like these suborbital flights.
Shatner is due to blast off from Blue Origin's west Texas launch site aboard a New Shepard vehicle in just four days...
Oct. 8, 2021 -- While it might be too far a stretch to say that the Intelligence Community is now embracing foreign-owned commercial remote sensing providers, there definitely is a shift underway in the willingness to acquire and use imagery produced by non-US satellite operators.
The reason? A study done in the spring by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), in the form of mock Olympic Games for remote sensing providers, twigged leaders to the fact that in a number of key sensor technologies, non-US firms are at the head of the pack.
"As a community, we’ve begun to realize that there’s a better way," Dave Gauthier, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s (NGA) Commercial and Business Operations unit, told Breaking Defense on Thursday...
Oct. 8, 2021 -- These days, the Jezero crater on Mars is an arid, barren depression. But it was a very different place billions of years ago, images taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover have revealed.
Scientists examined layers of sediments and rocks lodged in the sides of the crater, and determined that it was once a placid lake and river delta. That ultimately changed when powerful flash floods struck the crater, pummeling it with boulders swept in from the rim or beyond.
The geological history of the Jezero crater could help scientists understand how the Red Planet changed from being wet and possibly habitable into a harsh desert world...
Oct. 8, 2021 -- NASA’s New Horizons is still showing us how bizarre the outer solar system really is. A recent announcement out of the 53rd American Astronomical Society Meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences demonstrates that two Kuiper Belt objects that the spacecraft's camera homed in on are actually each close binary pairs.
The binary asteroids are named 2011 JY31 and 2014 OS393. Ground-based observatories discovered these objects, then New Horizons’ Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera captured them in September 2018, after its Pluto flyby, while it was en route to Arrokoth...
Oct. 7, 2021 -- On 19 December 2019, Tony Tyson, an experimental physicist at the University of California (UC), Davis, joined a conference call with billionaire Elon Musk that helped shape the fate of starry nights on Earth.
The call was cordial but tense. Seven months earlier, Musk’s company SpaceX had livestreamed a feed of 60 satellites drifting off into space from the bay of one of the firm’s rockets.
The satellites, the triumphant first wave of a project called Starlink, were built to beam down broadband internet to every corner of the globe. But as the satellites began to do laps around Earth, people looking up at night saw a string of glinting pearls as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper...
Oct. 5, 2021 -- A Russian actor and a film director rocketed to space Tuesday on a mission to make the world’s first movie in orbit, a project the Kremlin said will help burnish the nation’s space glory.
Actor Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko blasted off for the International Space Station in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft together with cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran of three space missions.
Their Soyuz MS-19 lifted off as scheduled at 1:55 p.m. (0855 GMT) from the Russian space launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan and arrived at the station after about 3½ hours...
Sept. 3, 2021 -- Astronomers may have captured the best view yet of matter colliding with the surface of a young star, findings that may shed light on what the sun looked like in its youth.
Newborn stars are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust from which planets, asteroids, comets and moons are born.
The star's magnetic field connects the star with this protoplanetary disk, "funneling material from the disk onto the star," study lead author Catherine Espaillat, an astrophysicist at Boston University, told Space.com...
Sept. 2, 2021 -- The rock appeared right where it should have been — captured within the drill bit of NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance.
After a perplexing failure last month, NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, was able to successfully collect a sample of rock on Wednesday. The rover took pictures of the rock in the tube and sent the images to Earth so that mission managers could be sure they had not come up empty again. The rock was there.
Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer for the rover, enthused on Twitter on Thursday morning, describing it as “one beautifully perfect cored sample.” [...]
Sept. 2, 2021 -- China is investigating how to build ultra-large spacecraft that are up to 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) long. But how feasible is the idea, and what would be the use of such a massive spacecraft?
The project is part of a wider call for research proposals from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, a funding agency managed by the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
A research outline posted on the foundation’s website described such enormous spaceships as “major strategic aerospace equipment for the future use of space resources, exploration of the mysteries of the universe, and long-term living in orbit.” [...]
Sept. 2, 2021 -- Today there are an estimated 18,000 pieces of trackable space junk in Earth’s orbit, which includes anything larger than a tennis ball.
The largest group of these are pieces of exploded rockets left to drift around our planet. In close second-place, however, are more than 3000 pieces of debris left over from anti-satellite tests.
Now a group of experts is calling for a ban on such tests, to stop the problem in its tracks before it has disastrous consequences...
Sept. 1, 2021 -- Swarms of small satellites could communicate amongst themselves to collect data on important weather patterns at different times of the day or year, and from multiple angles.
Such swarms, using machine learning algorithms, could revolutionize scientists’ understanding of weather and climate changes.
Engineer Sabrina Thompson is working on software to enable small spacecraft, or SmallSats, to communicate with each other, identify high-value observation targets, and coordinate attitude and timing to get different views of the same target...
AUG. 31, 2021 -- NASA currently has no plans to trade any of its Apollo-era lunar samples with those returned by China’s Chang’e-5 mission, although that agency’s chief scientist held out hope for such an exchange in the future.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group Aug. 31, Jim Green said that the restrictions in U.S. law on bilateral cooperation between NASA and Chinese organizations ruled out, for the time being, any exchange of lunar samples between the two nations.
“Currently, there’s no plans to create a bilateral arrangement with China on the exchange of samples,” he said, citing the Wolf Amendment, the decade-old provision in annual appropriations bills restricting such cooperation...
AUG. 31, 2021 -- New cracks have been found by Russian cosmonauts in a part of the International Space Station (ISS), Reuters reported on Monday.
Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer of rocket and space corporation Energia, told RIA news agency that the “superficial fissures” were spotted on the Zarya module, but did not elaborate on whether the cracks could lead to any air leaks.
This incident is only the latest minor mishap to befall the ISS...
AUG. 31, 2021 -- A new study offers a tantalizing explanation for how a peculiar cosmic object called WISEA J153429.75-104303.3 -- nicknamed “The Accident” -- came to be.
The Accident is a brown dwarf. Though they form like stars, these objects don’t have enough mass to kickstart nuclear fusion, the process that causes stars to shine. And while brown dwarfs sometimes defy characterization, astronomers have a good grasp on their general characteristics.
Or they did, until they found this one...
AUG. 30, 2021 -- We may finally have a way to detect the quantum nature of gravity.
The question of how gravity and quantum mechanics fit together has been one of the biggest problems in physics for decades.
The way that quantum fluctuations affect gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time caused by the movements of massive objects -- may give physicists a way to solve it...
AUG. 25, 2021 -- There’s probably a large space rock out there, somewhere, that has Earth in its cross hairs.
Scientists have in fact spotted one candidate -- Bennu, which has a small chance of banging into our planet in the year 2182. But whether it’s Bennu or another asteroid, the question will be how to avoid a very unwelcome cosmic rendezvous.
For almost 20 years, a team of researchers has been preparing for such a scenario...
AUG. 24, 2021 -- New stars are born! NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of bright, baby stars peeking out of a "stellar nursery" -- a cloud of dust where stars are born.
This spectacular stellar nursery lies in the constellation of Gemini, NASA said in a statement. Officially called AFGL 5180, the nursery is one of many star-forming regions, which have the right density of dust and gas for that material to eventually collapse in on itself and form a star.
Although the surrounding dust "makes for a spectacular image," according to NASA, it also obscures new star growth from astronomers...
AUG. 24, 2021 -- With NASA’s Psyche mission now less than a year from launch, anticipation is building. By next spring, the fully assembled spacecraft will ship from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a launch period that opens Aug. 1, 2022.
In early 2026, the Psyche spacecraft will arrive at its target, an asteroid of the same name in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe asteroid Psyche, which is about 140 miles (226 kilometers) wide, is made largely of iron and nickel and could be the core of an early planet.
The spacecraft will spend 21 months orbiting the asteroid and gathering science data with a magnetometer, a multispectral imager, and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer. The information the instruments gather won’t just help scientists understand this particular object; it will lend valuable insight into how Earth and other planets formed...
AUG. 23, 2021 -- The overall space economy expanded 4.4 percent to $447 billion in 2020 with more nations participating than ever before, according to the Space Foundation’s updated Space Report.
Global government spending on military and civil space programs, however, declined slightly in 2020 compared with 2019.
“Overall, there was the slightest decline, down 1.2 percent,” Lesley Conn, Space Foundation senior manager in research and analysis, said Aug. 23 during a press briefing at the 36th Space Symposium...
AUG. 23, 2021 -- Black holes are often described as dangerous destructive entities that never give up what falls into their grasp.
But what if black holes are protective -- shielding us from the unpredictable effects of places where our physical understanding of the universe breaks down?
This question might sound flippant, but in fact, it is at the heart of a decades-long physics puzzle known as “cosmic censorship,” one that researchers may finally be close to answering...
AUG. 23, 2021 -- NASA is delaying a spacewalk at the International Space Station this week because of an undisclosed medical issue involving one of its astronauts.
Officials announced the postponement Monday, less than 24 hours before Mark Vande Hei was supposed to float outside.
Vande Hei is dealing with “a minor medical issue,” officials said in a statement. It’s not an emergency, they noted, but didn’t provide any further details...
AUG. 23, 2021 -- Astronaut hopefuls are being asked for their patience as ESA processes over 23 000 applications to its Astronaut and Astronaut (with a disability) vacancies. This number far exceeds the Agency’s most optimistic forecasts.
Head of space medicine at ESA’s European Astronaut Centre (EAC) Guillaume Weerts is part of the team leading the astronaut selection. He says the number of applications is a positive indication of the level of interest in space activities in Europe, but it will take some time to work through.
“At ESA, we firmly believe that every application should receive the attention it deserves. With the considerable number of applicants, it simply takes more time than initially foreseen,” explains Guillaume...
AUG. 23, 2021 -- Approximately 5 million years ago, a portion of the western wall of a large and deep impact crater located in the Nilosyrtis Mensae region of Mars gave way.
The Red Planet’s landscape abounds with steep canyon walls that have collapsed, so landslides must be quite common.
But what makes this one particularly interesting is that it shows traits of being a mudslide...
AUG. 19, 2021 -- There's a story, possibly apocryphal, about a cosmonaut who conducted a plant-growing experiment aboard a Russian orbiter in the 1970s or '80s.
When the cosmonaut returned to Earth, he was evasive about the experiment’s outcome. “I ate it,” he finally declared. “I just had to eat something fresh.”
Kai Staats, director of a new research facility known as the Space Analog for the Moon and Mars (SAM), likes to tell this tale to illustrate two things about space travel: It’s hard to underestimate the importance of fresh vegetables when you’re living in a tin can for months or years on end, and human beings are unpredictable...
AUG. 19, 2021 -- Physicists have created the first ever two-dimensional supersolid -- a bizarre phase of matter that behaves like both a solid and a frictionless liquid at the same time.
When the cosmonaut returned to Earth, he was evasive about the experiment’s outcome. “I ate it,” he finally declared. “I just had to eat something fresh.”
Despite their freakish properties, which appear to violate many of the known laws of physics, physicists have long predicted them theoretically -- they first appeared as a suggestion in the work of the physicist Eugene Gross as early as 1957...
AUG. 19, 2021 -- Japanese space agency scientists said Thursday they plan to bring soil samples back from the Mars region ahead of the United States and China, which started Mars missions last year, in hopes of finding clues to the planet’s origin and traces of possible life.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, plans to launch an explorer in 2024 to land on Phobos, a Martian moon, to collect 10 grams (0.35 ounce) of soil and bring it back to Earth in 2029.
The rapid return trip is expected to put Japan ahead of the United States and China in bringing back samples from the Martian region despite starting later, project manager Yasuhiro Kawakatsu said in an online news conference...
AUG. 18, 2021 -- Ask astronomers what question they most want to answer, and you will get scattered responses: How did the first stars, galaxies and black holes form? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? Are we alone?
Each question demands its own large telescope: no ultimate, one-size-fits-all instrument will ever exist, for none can be made to gather each and every kind of cosmic light.
Black holes sometimes shine in x-rays, for instance, whereas Earth-like exoplanets are best studied in optical and infrared light. Yet such projects so strain the fraction of public and private funds allocated to astronomy that only a few—perhaps just one—can be prioritized at a time, leading to pileups of also-ran proposals and anxious researchers awaiting a rare chance to open new windows on the universe...
AUG. 18, 2021 -- Two astronauts will venture outside the International Space Station Tuesday, Aug. 24, for a spacewalk to install a support bracket in preparation for future installation of the orbiting laboratory’s third new solar array.
NASA will discuss the upcoming spacewalk during a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Aug. 23. Live coverage of the news conference and spacewalk will air on NASA Television, the agency’s website, and the NASA app.
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and astronaut Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will install a support bracket, called a modification kit, on the inward port side of the station’s backbone truss structure in a position known as P4, which is closest to the station’s pressurized living space...
AUG. 17, 2021 -- Europe’s Vega has delivered Pléiades Neo-4 and four auxiliary payloads, SunStorm, RadCube and LEDSAT developed through ESA, and BRO-4, to their planned orbits.
Liftoff of flight VV19 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana came at 02:47 BST on 17 August (03:47 CEST; 22:47 local time on 16 August) for a mission lasting about 105 minutes.
Pléiades Neo-4, the primary payload with a launch mass of 922 kg, was the first to be released into a Sun-synchronous orbit about 55 minutes into the mission...
AUG. 16, 2021 -- Saturn’s icy rings are not just aesthetically wondrous marvels. One of them also records a beautiful planetary soundtrack.
The planet’s interior, concealed beneath a shroud of mostly hydrogen gas, convulses. This causes shifts in the local gravity field, which pulls at particles in Saturn’s expansive C ring and makes them dance.
These idiosyncratic prances can take the form of spiral waves, and distinct sets of waves reveal the characteristics of particular features of Saturn’s insides...
AUG. 16, 2021 -- The asteroid accredited with the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is likely to have originated from the outer half of the solar system’s main asteroid belt, according to new research by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).
Known as the Chicxulub impactor, this large object has an estimated width of 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) and produced a crater in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula that spans 90 miles (145 kilometers).
After its sudden contact with Earth, the asteroid wiped out not only the dinosaurs, but around 75 percent of the planet’s animal species. It is widely accepted that this explosive force created was responsible for the mass extinction that ended the Mesozoic era...
AUG. 13, 2021 -- No one knows why quasars flicker. Yet these wavering beacons of light might be sending us a message about the black hole systems that power them.
Whirling plasma disks feed supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, and these disks produce a cascade of visible and ultraviolet light that can outshine all the stars in the host.
With so much energy packed into such a small space, though, the disks become unstable...
AUG. 13, 2021 -- Boeing’s astronaut capsule is grounded for months and possibly even until next year because of a vexing valve problem.
Boeing and NASA officials said Friday that the Starliner capsule will be removed from the top of its rocket and returned to its Kennedy Space Center hangar for more extensive repairs.
Starliner was poised to blast off on a repeat test flight to the International Space Station last week -- carrying a mannequin but no astronauts -- when the trouble arose. A similar capsule was plagued by software issues in 2019 that prevented it from reaching the space station...
AUG. 13, 2021 -- ESA’s Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo spacecraft made a historic Venus flyby earlier this week, passing by the planet within 33 hours of each other and capturing unique imagery and data during the encounter.
The ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft flew past Venus on 9 August at a distance of 7995 km, while the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission skimmed past at just 552 km from the planet’s surface on 10 August.
The flybys were needed to give the spacecraft a gravity assist to help them reach their next destinations...
AUG. 12, 2021 -- It’s not the plot of another doomsday movie. Yet there is a pending, albeit unlikely, threat to life as we know it: an asteroid approaching Earth.
Bennu, a rugged, rock-spewing asteroid with a diameter of about one-third of a mile, is headed in our direction, on track to come very close to Earth in September of 2135.
But not to panic, scientists with NASA said Wednesday. Though Bennu will come within half the distance of the moon, the odds of the asteroid colliding with Earth in the next century and causing Armageddon-type of destruction are still very low...
AUG. 12, 2021 -- For the Perseverance rover team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the early predawn hours of August 6 were like the night before Christmas.
Hours earlier, the scientists had ordered the rover to drill into a rock within Mars’s Jezero Crater to extract and store the mission’s very first sample of Martian geology -- one of up to 43 specimens that will one day be delivered to Earth and examined for signs of ancient life.
Around 2 A.M., as they began reviewing fresh data beamed back from Mars by the rover, everything looked to have proceeded perfectly: the sample appeared to have been acquired and placed in one of the rover’s 43 storage tubes. But a nasty surprise soon came...
AUG. 11, 2021 -- Nora AlMatrooshi's first spaceflight equipment was made of paper and cardboard boxes, but she'll soon spend two years at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas training to use the real thing in orbit.
In April, AlMatrooshi, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer, became one of two new astronauts for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the first female Arab astronaut.
Her colleague, Mohammad AlMulla, 32 at the announcement, spent more than a decade as a helicopter pilot and teacher with Dubai's police force before deciding to apply to join the astronaut corps...
AUG. 10, 2021 -- Northrop Grumman’s latest space station delivery includes pizza for seven.
The company’s Cygnus cargo ship rocketed away from Virginia’s eastern shore Tuesday. It should reach the International Space Station on Thursday.
The 8,200-pound (3,700-kilogram) shipment includes fresh apples, tomatoes and kiwi, along with a pizza kit and cheese smorgasbord for the seven station astronauts...
AUG. 10, 2021 -- With Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson recently completing their pioneering space flights that could set the stage for future space tourism, it is worth taking a look at what might be involved for the human exploration of Mars, even though it’s likely decades away.
Elon Musk is perhaps the best-known advocate for going to Mars, but the idea is decades old.
In a 1966 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences paper, Gordon R. Woodcock of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center theorized how the Saturn V launch vehicle—at the time in development for the Apollo lunar missions -- could be used for a Mars exploration...
AUG. 10, 2021 -- Astronomers have found that the most common stars in the galaxy might not be as perilous as once thought, making way for more potentially habitable exoplanets. The results will appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Red dwarf stars — also known as M dwarfs — comprise about 75% of all stars in the Milky Way.
They’re much cooler and smaller than the Sun and, since some of them lack the internal layers that Sun-like stars have, their churning guts and fast rotation make them prone to extreme magnetic activity, such as flares. Flares occur when the stellar magnetic fields get twisted up and then snap back into alignment, exerting high-energy radiation in the process...
AUG. 9, 2021 -- China’s main spacecraft maker is developing a human landing system for lunar missions, according to an account of an official academic visit.
The brief news report from Xiamen University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics July 1 (Chinese) names individuals leading projects pertinent to China’s human lunar landing plans and notably refers to the landing project as a “national strategy”.
China is already known to be developing and testing new launch vehicles and a new-generation spacecraft capable of sending astronauts to the moon. A lunar landing and ascent system has one of the missing key components of a human lunar landing architecture...
AUG. 9, 2021 -- Jupiter's mysterious "energy crisis" that has puzzled astronomers for 50 years could be caused by auroras, new observations suggest.
The largest planet in our solar system has long been known to be remarkably warm, despite its great distance from the sun. Jupiter lies more than 5 astronomical units, or sun-Earth distances away (1 AU is million miles (150 million kilometers).
There's so little sunlight that far from the sun that Jupiter's upper atmosphere should be frigid, scientists estimate it should be about -100 degrees Fahrenheit (-73 degrees Celsius), according to a NASA statement. However, the average temperature in Jupiter's upper atmosphere is a roasting 800 degrees F (426 C) — almost as hot as the surface of the hellish planet Venus....