Space News & Blog Articles

How iPhone 14 will connect to satellites. Why SLS didn’t launch and when it might. Growing rice in space. And a new incredible image from James Webb. All this and more space news in this week’s episode of Space Bites.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is on its way to rendezvous with the double-asteroid Didymos. When it arrives on September 26th, DART will collide with Dimorphos – the 160-meter (525-foot) moonlet that orbits the main body – to evaluate the kinetic impact technique for the very first time. This proposed method of planetary defense consists of a spacecraft colliding with an asteroid to alter its orbit and prevent it from colliding with Earth. In July, DART took its first image of the double-asteroid, which NASA released earlier this week!

A recent YouTube video made by YouTube account, Hazegrayart, combines awesome computer animation, great music, and crisp archived audio recordings to show how NASA’s future Lunar Gateway will function for the upcoming Artemis missions. The archived audio recordings encompass only about a third of the short four and a half minutes of video, with almost the entire length being filled with a gorgeous and relaxing soundtrack as the viewer is left fixated watching a slow and methodical ballet of spaceships come together at Gateway.

Compared to the lifespan of stars, human lives are pretty short. Stars such as Betelgeuse (in Orion) live for millions of years. Others exist for billions of years. We (if we’re lucky) get maybe 100 years (more or less). So, to us, stars don’t appear to change much over our lifetimes, unless they blow up as supernovae. But, what about over the course of 20 or 30 successive lifetimes?

New images of the Sun’s chromosphere – the lower region of the solar atmosphere — have been released, and to say they are ‘stellar’ is an understatement. Simply, they are stunning. The high-resolution images were taken with the now-fully-operational Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the summit of Haleakala, Maui, in Hawai‘i. Scientists say the new observatory — with its large 4-meter (13-ft) primary mirror — will enable a new era of solar science, and provide a leap forward in understanding the Sun and its impacts on our planet.

To date, 5,084 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,811 planetary systems, with another 8,912 candidates awaiting confirmation. These discoveries have provided astronomers with a detailed sampling of the types of planets that exist in our Universe, ranging from gas giants several times the size of Jupiter to smaller, rocky bodies like Earth. So far, the vast majority of these have been discovered using indirect methods – like the Transit Method (Transit Photometry) and the Radial Velocity Method (Doppler Spectroscopy) – while the remainder has been detected using various other means.

A new satellite launching this weekend BlueWalker-3 could be conspicuously bright once it’s unfurled in orbit.

Can humans reproduce in space? The short answer is that we don’t know. The long answer is maybe, but there are significant barriers to overcome to make zero-gravity pregnancy safe, and research into the subject is only just beginning.

After two scrubs for Artemis I, there were serious concerns there will be no further launch attempts at least until mid-October. But it looks like we might see the maiden flight of SLS in September after all.

What’s the loudest sound you’ve ever heard? Many people will say an aircraft engine unless they are lucky enough to have attended a rocket launch. And if there was one rocket that was louder than them all, it was the Saturn V, the behemoth that blasted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. But just how loud was it?

In this decade, multiple space agencies will send astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era. In addition to NASA, the ESA, China, and Roscosmos, commercial space entities like SpaceX and Blue Origin are hoping to conduct regular missions in support of human exploration while also mounting their own private ventures. In time, this activity could result in the creation of permanent infrastructure, a regular human presence, and the emergence of a lunar economy. Nevertheless, there are many questions about how humans will live in lunar conditions and what type of facilities will be needed.

What is the greatest challenge facing humans as we prepare for the first crewed missions to Mars? Solar and cosmic radiation? Atrophying bone and muscle? Growing food? How about laundry? It’s strange but true, right now we don’t have a way to clean laundry in space.

This interesting image from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a field of fascinating dunes called barchan dunes. These dunes have formed along a cliff in Chasma Boreale, in the North Pole of Mars.

A memorial spaceflight paying tribute to the cast and crew of the original “Star Trek” TV show has just added another star to the passenger list.

Earlier today Apple announced that its new generation of phones, iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro, will have the Emergency SOS feature. It will allow sending distress messages and sharing location by connecting directly to satellites. So, how exactly it will work?

One of the biggest questions facing astronomers today concerns star formation and its role in the evolution of galaxies. In particular, astronomers are curious whether the process began in the central regions of galaxies, where stars are more tightly bound. Previous observations have shown that numerous galaxies experienced intense periods of star formation in their centers roughly one billion years after the Big Bang. For some time, astronomers have wanted to conduct similar observations of the Milky Way’s Galactic Center to study rapid star formation more closely.

Here’s the Tarantula Nebula like we’ve never seen it before. The James Webb Space Telescope turned its detectors towards the Large Magellanic Cloud about 161,000 lightyears away to take a look at 30 Doradus, more commonly known as the Tarantula Nebula. JWST’s exceptional infrared view has now revealed thousands of never-before-seen young stars in this stellar nursery, as well incredible views of the wispy, dusty filaments and the impressive collection of massive older stars.

Asteroids are commonly thought of as solid balls of rock and metal – a place where Bruce Willis can land and stick a nuke into the middle of it. But as we learn more about them, it is becoming more evident that many asteroids are just piles of rubble held loosely together by gravity. So it might not be too big of a surprise when some of those pieces of rubble fly off of the asteroid itself. But it surprised scientists who first observed the phenomena on the asteroid Bennu when OSIRIS-REx visited it in 2019. Now a team led by researchers at the field museum found a meteorite that shows signs it underwent the same process.

In a joint effort between NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft and the United Arab Emirates’ Emirates Mars mission (EMM), scientists have observed an uncommonly chaotic interaction between the solar wind and Mars’ upper atmosphere, creating a unique ultraviolet aurora. The phenomenon represents an unusual occurrence in Martian space weather, and scientists are excited to take advantage of future collaborations between spacecraft to keep an eye out for repeat events.

In 1982, author James Michener published his sprawling Space Race novel, Space. In it, he describes a fictional Apollo 18 mission to the Moon. While the astronauts are on the surface, the Sun unleashes a huge storm, trapping them outside of their protective capsule. The two men get blasted by lethal amounts of radiation before they can get to safety.

Rice is one of the world’s staple crops. It is regularly eaten by more than half the world’s population. And now, it’s been grown in microgravity, on board the newly launched Chinese Wentian space laboratory.