Firefly’s Alpha launch vehicle stands on its launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base on Sept. 10. Credit: Brian Sandoval / Spaceflight Now
A year after an early engine shutdown cut short an inaugural test flight, Firefly Aerospace’s second Alpha launcher is scheduled to take off Sunday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a demonstration mission to place seven small satellites into orbit.
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.
SpaceX is counting down to a static fire test of a Falcon 9 rocket on pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The test-firing of the booster’s nine engines is in preparation for a launch with 54 more Starlink internet satellites as soon as Sunday night at 10:53 p.m. EDT (0253 GMT Monday).
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 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands on pad 39A Saturday morning. Credit: Spaceflight Now
The 39th and 40th launches of the year from Florida’s Space Coast are set to blast off Saturday night and Sunday night, back-to-back missions to deploy more satellites for SpaceX’s Starlink internet network, plus a rideshare payload for AST Space Mobile’s planned space-based cellular broadband network.
The Standard Model of Physics is the theory of particles, fields and the fundamental forces that govern them.
Ancient organisms were 'killed, grilled and buried," a study found after studying small impact craters.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will fly for the 14th time on Saturday night (Sept. 10), launching 34 of the company's Starlink satellites and a smartphone connectivity test craft to orbit. Watch it live.
An affordable refractor with lots of aperture, a built-in red light and a novel solution for smartphone astrophotography.
Water driven toward Earth's center by plate tectonics could lead to the creation of diamonds at the boundary between the core and the mantle.
September's full moon, the Harvest Moon, will be joined in the night sky by Jupiter and Neptune on Saturday (Sept. 10).
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.
The United States will soon ask other nations to follow its lead and abandon destructive, debris-spawning anti-satellite testing, Vice President Kamala Harris said.
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?
Power up exclusive images and comments for Titan Books' "The Art of Love, Death + Robots"
DARPA's ANCILLARY program aims to develop a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft that can operate in areas without preexisting air bases or other infrastructure.
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter just flew for the 31st time on Mars, acing a short hop that took it closer to an ancient Red Planet river delta.
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.
The FCC has a new rule pending in its ongoing fight against space debris.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke today (Sept. 9) to with Expedition 67 astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Harris will also chair a key space meeting today.
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