Every journey begins with a single step, and the first step of NASA’s return to the Moon begins with a four-mile rollout to the launchpad. NASA announced their target date for rolling out the Space Launch System rocket for the four-mile crawl to the launch pad is March 17. The full rocket stack will spend about a month at the pad undergoing several tests before heading back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. If all goes well with the tests, NASA hopes to launch its uncrewed Artemis test flight, likely by early summer.
Continue reading “New Images of Artemis in the VAB; Rollout for SLS Launch Rehearsal Test Now Scheduled for March 17”Curiosity Finds a Bizarre Rock on Mars that Looks Like a Flower
The Curiosity rover took a picture of something pretty enticing this week on the surface of Mars. While the object in question looks like a tiny little flower or maybe even some type of organic feature, the rover team confirmed this object is a mineral formation, with delicate structures that formed by mineral precipitating from water. The size of this tiny object is just 1 centimeter.
Continue reading “Curiosity Finds a Bizarre Rock on Mars that Looks Like a Flower”Webb turns those 18 separate star images into a single unified star. Next comes even better focus.
It’s coming together! Engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope have now completed two more phases of the seven-step, three-month-long mirror alignment process. This week, the team made more adjustments to the mirror segments along with updating the alignment of its secondary mirror. These refinements allowed for all 18 mirror segments to work together — for the first time — to produce one unified image.
Continue reading “Webb turns those 18 separate star images into a single unified star. Next comes even better focus.”Need Some More Ytterbium? Who Doesn’t? Here’s Where you can Find it in Space
Looking to do some mining in space? Need a little Ytterbium on your next flight through the galaxy? Researchers have figured out the best places in the cosmos to find this unusual but useful element.
Continue reading “Need Some More Ytterbium? Who Doesn’t? Here’s Where you can Find it in Space”Chinese Rover Finds Translucent Glass Globules on the Moon
Scientists say China’s Yutu-2 rover, part of the Chang’E-4 mission, has found several small glass globules on the Moon’s far side. While tiny glass beads have been found previously in lunar samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts, the ones found by Yutu-2 are much bigger and translucent.
The discovery was made by Dr. Zhiyong Xiao, one of the lead scientific team members of the Chang’E-4 mission. They beads were found by looking at panoramic images taken by the rover. Since the rover doesn’t have sampling capabilities and is not a sample return mission like it’s older sibling, the Chang-E-5 mission, there is no compositional data on the glass beads, only observational evidence.
Continue reading “Chinese Rover Finds Translucent Glass Globules on the Moon”We don’t Know Exactly When the Dinosaurs Died, but Now We Know it was in the Springtime
We’ve long known a disaster took place about 66 million years ago, where in a geological instant, 75% of the plants and animals on Earth were wiped out, including all the land-roaming dinosaurs. But here’s a new detail about that event: Even though we can’t pinpoint exactly what year this disaster took place, we now know it happened during the springtime.
Continue reading “We don’t Know Exactly When the Dinosaurs Died, but Now We Know it was in the Springtime”Here’s Exactly how Engineers Are Aligning JWST’s Segmented Mirrors
Engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope are in the midst of an intricate, three-month-long process of aligning the telescope’s 18 separate mirror segments to work together as one giant, high-precision 6.5-meter (21.3-foot) primary telescope mirror.
This process, called phasing, began in early February and includes seven different steps, which goes from taking the mirrors’ initial placements after they were deployed to doing a “coarse” and then “fine” alignment, and then making sure the mirror works with all four of Webb’s instruments and their various fields of view.
Continue reading “Here’s Exactly how Engineers Are Aligning JWST’s Segmented Mirrors”How Time Flies: Perseverance and Ingenuity Have Been on Mars for a Year
What a year it’s been — Earth year, that is!
The dramatic touchdown on Mars for the Perseverance rover and the stowaway Ingenuity helicopter on February 18, 2021 was a bright moment in a tumultuous year here on Earth. And even though the pandemic meant that many people were watching the event from home – even some of the Mars rover team – NASA made sure to share the event as widely as possible.
Here’s a video highlight of that day, with pictures and video from both planets, and watching it brings smiles, goosebumps tears of joy. Of course, the incredible video we received of the landing from from the rover itself – especially the sky-crane lowering Perseverance to the planet’s surface — is nothing short of stunning.
Continue reading “How Time Flies: Perseverance and Ingenuity Have Been on Mars for a Year”A Colossal Flare Erupted From the Far Side of the Sun
Earlier this week the Sun erupted with a huge explosion, blasting solar particles millions of kilometers into space. The team for the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft says the blast is the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc.
Luckily for us here on Earth, the eruption on February 15, 2022 occurred on the farside of the Sun, the side facing away from our planet. But ESA and NASA predict geomagnetic storms are possible in the next few days as the active region on the Sun responsible for the blast turns toward us.
Continue reading “A Colossal Flare Erupted From the Far Side of the Sun”The First Image From NASA’s new X-ray Observatory
It’s first light for one of the newest space observatories! The Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer team has released their first image, taken after a month-long commissioning phase for the spacecraft. And it’s a beauty.
IXPE looked at a favorite target among space observatories, the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. While x-rays are invisible to human eyes, the amount of magenta color in this image corresponds to the intensity of X-ray light observed. Needless to say, it’s intense with high energy x-rays.
Continue reading “The First Image From NASA’s new X-ray Observatory”