A close-up of the top of the Falcon 9 booster stage set for launch with the Transporter 3 rideshare mission. Credit: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now / Coldlife Photography
SpaceX plans to land a Falcon 9 rocket booster back at Cape Canaveral around eight-and-a-half minutes after launch Thursday in the company’s first onshore rocket recovery since last June.
Located in the Okanagan Valley outside of Penticton, British Columbia, there is a massive radio observatory dedicated to observing cosmic radio phenomena. It’s called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a cylindrical parabolic radio telescope that looks like what snowboarders would call a “half-pipe.” This array is part of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO), overseen by the National Research Council (NRC).
A Falcon 9 rocket stands vertical on pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for liftoff on SpaceX’s Transporter 3 rideshare mission. Credit: SpaceX
With its small satellite launch business booming, SpaceX is set to double its cadence of dedicated rideshare missions this year, beginning with the liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket Thursday from Cape Canaveral with 105 spacecraft for customers in 20 countries.
In the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, the intense UV and X-ray radiation from the Sun bombards molecules and atoms, causing them to split apart. The resulting positively charged nuclei are called ions, and the free electrons are called…free electrons. These charged particles behave differently than normal neutral molecules, especially when it comes to how they interact with radio waves.
The first SLS mission, an uncrewed flight around the moon, is scheduled to launch in March. Crewed missions are slated to follow in 2024 and 2025.
File photo of a previous Astra rocket on a launch pad in Alaska. Credit: Astra
Tests are beginning this week at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for the first flight of Astra’s small satellite launcher from the Florida spaceport, following the company’s successful November demonstration mission from Alaska.
Just weeks after the excitement of launch, the James Webb Space Telescope is already seeking focus in space.
A huge asteroid will safely whiz by our planet next week.
China’s Chang’e-5 lunar lander has found evidence of hydroxyl (OH) on the Moon. Hydroxyl is a close chemical cousin of water, H2O. While several other orbital missions have detected OH on the Moon previously, Chang’e-5 marks the first time it has been detected by a spacecraft sitting on the lunar surface.
The spacecraft is riding out a dust storm, but the agency said it hopes to resume normal operations next week.
It’s another first for astronomy.
NASA may need more astronauts to meet its human spaceflight goals over the coming years, according to a new report from the agency's investigative office.
Earth is surrounded by a vast bubble about 1,000 light-years wide whose borders drive the formation of all nearby young stars, a new study finds.
A central aspect of galactic evolution is that they must eat or be eaten. Dark energy strives to push galaxies apart, but gravity tries to pull them together. As a result, galaxies tend to form into local groups. As these superclusters of galaxies become more isolated due to cosmic expansion, they gravitationally turn on each other, and in time the largest galaxies of the group will consume the smaller ones. The Milky Way is one of the larger galaxies in our local group, and so it has consumed smaller galaxies in the past. But piecing together the history of these galactic meals is a real challenge.
A detailed study of 12 streams of stars swirling in and around the Milky Way will ultimately help shed light on our galaxy's dark matter halo.
Some of the agency's Earth-observing satellites have been in operation since the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Find out how track the International Space Station from Earth and see where it is right now.
Water was spotted on the moon nearly 15 years ago, but it was detected in real time on the lunar surface only by orbiters before now.
The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is leaking.
In 1866 the American astronomer Daniel Kirkwood was studying all the known asteroids, which at the time amounted to several hundred. If you just look at a snapshot of the solar system, there’s nothing that particularly stands out about the asteroids. They appear to have all sorts of random positions and random orbits within the main asteroid belt, which sits halfway between Mars and Jupiter.
A stellar collection of the best space and astronomy books for 2022.
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