A Falcon 9 rocket stands ready to launch the Eutelsat 36D mission at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on March 30, 2024. Image: Spaceflight Now
SpaceX is aiming for an ambitious launch cadence on Saturday evening with potentially three launches on tap in fewer than five hours. The first two Falcon 9 rockets are set to depart from Florida’s Space Coast with the last mission taking off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Dune: What the climate of Arrakis can tell us about the hunt for habitable exoplanets
On Episode 104 of This Week In Space, Rod and Tariq talk with National Space Society chapter leader Robert Aillon about NASA's Artemis Accords.
The total solar eclipse on April 8 is part of a repeating pattern of eclipses that last visited North America in 1970. Here’s why the same eclipse repeats every 54 years.
SpaceX aims to launch three Falcon 9 rockets today (March 30) from both coasts in a roughly five-hour span.
New observations provide an intriguing window into what happens when a slumbering black hole awakens to devour a star.
NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have been training on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft for years. The team says they're ready for the first astronaut launch no earlier than May 1.
A recent study presented at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) discusses the Mars Astrobiology, Resource, and Science Explorers (MARSE) mission concept and its Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device (SHIELD), which offers a broader and cheaper method regarding the search for—past or present—life on the Red Planet, specifically by using four rovers at four different landing sites across Mars’ surface instead of just one-for-one. This concept comes as NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers continue to tirelessly explore the surface of Mars at Gale Crater and Jezero Crater, respectively.
On March 28, Earth was hit by an X-class solar flare that was strong enough to ionize part of the planet's atmosphere.
Cumulus clouds rapidly dissipate as the land surface cools. This isn't just good news for eclipse chasers on April 8, but also has implications for sun-obscuring geoengineering efforts.
The Milky Way has many satellite galaxies, most notably the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They’re both visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. Now astronomers have discovered another satellite that’s the smallest and dimmest one ever detected. It may also be one of the most dark matter-dominated galaxies ever found.
Varda Space has written up the results of its groundbreaking W-1 mission, which successfully crystalized the metastable Form III of the antiviral drug ritonavir in space and returned it to Earth.
Earlier this month, a sudden atmospheric warming event caused the Arctic's polar vortex to reverse its trajectory. The swirling ring of cold air is now spinning in the wrong direction, which has triggered a record-breaking "ozone spike" and could impact global weather patterns.
We’ve reported on a technology called pulsed plasma rockets (PPRs) here at UT a few times. Several research groups have worked on variations of them. They are so popular partly because of their extremely high specific impulse and thrust levels, and they seemingly solve the trade-off between those two all-important variables in space exploration propulsion systems. Essentially, they are an extremely efficient propulsion methodology that, if scaled up, would allow payloads to reach other planets in weeks rather than months or years. However, some inherent dangers still need to be worked out, and overcoming some of those dangers was the purpose of a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project back in 2020.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory just hit a milestone with its 5,000th comet detection.
This impressive Lego Star Wars ship packs in plenty of detail without breaking the bank.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been ongoing for decades at this point. Despite that, we have yet to find any rock-hard evidence of a signal from an alien civilization. When asked about this, experts point out just how little of the overall signal space we’ve analyzed. A signal could be coming from anywhere in the sky, at any frequency, and might not be continuous. Constraining the “search space” could help us find a signal faster, but what could we use to constrain it? It’s hard to think like an alien intelligence, let alone to mimic them.
Rosalind Franklin, the ESA’s Mars rover, is scheduled to launch no sooner than 2028. Its destination is Oxia Planum, a wide clay-bearing plain to the east of Chryse Planitia. Oxia Planum contains terrains that date back to Mars’ Noachian Period, when there may have been abundant surface water, a key factor in the rover’s mission.
A small galaxy is bursting with star formation in a dazzling new image from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Catching a supernova in action is tricky business. There is no way to predict them, and they don’t occur very often. Within the Milky Way they only occur about once a century, and the last one was observed in 1604.
A quasar over three billion light-years away was found to be rather gentle on its host galaxy, allowing its black hole to keep growing.
All Rights Reserved. 2024. SpaceZE.com
