Space and astronomy news
This is it, folks. Feast your eyes! It’s what we’ve been training for—seeing the James Webb Space Telescope’s first detailed view of the Orion Nebula! JWST’s NIRCam gazed at this starbirth nursery and revealed incredible details hidden from view by gas and dust clouds.
Continue reading “The Webb Image you’ve Been Waiting For: the Orion Nebula”
Massive solar storms on the Sun are becoming more common as it moves into a period of increasing solar activity as part of Solar Cycle 25, which is expected to peak in 2025. There’s one spacecraft that will be very well placed to capture that increasing activity. Solar Orbiter is currently 25% of the way through its ten-year mission of observing the Sun. By 2025 it will be closer than ever to our parent star, and it has already started observing some fantastic phenomena from our Sun.
Continue reading “Solar Orbiter was hit by a Coronal Mass Ejection as it was About to Make a Flyby of Venus”
NASA announced they have chosen Axiom Space to build the spacesuits for the next astronauts to walk on the Moon. The spacesuits will be used on the Artemis III mission, which is planned to land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface.
Axiom Space says the new spacesuits will provide astronauts with advanced capabilities for space exploration while providing NASA commercially developed human systems needed to access, live, and work in microgravity as well as on and around the Moon.
Continue reading “NASA Chooses a Supplier to Build its Moonwalking Spacesuits”
The ice giant planets of Neptune and Uranus might have just the right conditions to rain diamonds. Unfortunately we can’t go and check ourselves, so we have to rely on laboratory recreations of their atmospheres to find out. And so that’s exactly what a team of physicist did: they used a vaporized form of common plastics to find out how quickly and how easily diamonds could grow in those kinds of conditions.
Continue reading “It’s Thought to Rain Diamonds on Uranus and Neptune, and now Scientists Duplicated it in the lab”
Earth is not just habitable, it’s unusually habitable. It’s rather wet for a planet so close to its Sun, it’s geologically active, and it has a stable orbit, all of which are necessary for life as we know it. But there are also secondary advantages, such as not being constantly bombarded by large asteroids, and having a rotational axis that is fairly stable. This is due in part thanks to the planet Jupiter. The giant planet has helped clear the solar system of asteroid debris and may have helped stabilize the orbits of the inner planets. So life is good. But a new study shows that if Jupiter had a different orbit, life could be even better.
Continue reading “If Jupiter's Orbit got Weirder, it Would Actually Make Earth More Habitable”
We recently explored how the Apple TV+ series, For All Mankind, gives us a harsh reality check about the harshness of human space exploration. In the show, astronauts struggle, some go crazy, and a lot of them die in the pursuit of planting our flag just a little farther from home. We discussed how while For All Mankind is both science fiction and takes place in an alternate universe, our future Artemis and Mars astronauts will very likely endure the same struggles and hardships as the show’s beloved characters.
When Artemis astronauts finally land on the Moon, they’ll be there anywhere from a few days to a few months. While the Moon is only a few days travel time from Earth, Artemis astronauts may still get a little cranky being stuck in their habitat and unable to go outside without a spacesuit.
Continue reading “Using Virtual/Augmented Reality and Holoportation to Help Improve Mental Health for Future Mars Astronauts”
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.
Continue reading “AMAZING JWST Image, iPhone 14 and Satellites, Green Sand on Mars”
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!
Continue reading “DART Sees Asteroid Didymos for the First Time. In two Weeks, it’ll Crash Into its Moon”
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 very relaxing soundtrack as the viewer is left fixated watching a slow and methodical ballet of spaceships come together at Gateway.
Continue reading “New Animation Shows how the Artemis Missions Will use the Lunar Gateway and a Starship to put Humans Back onto the Moon”
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?
Continue reading “Just 2,000 Years Ago, Betelgeuse Was Yellow, Not Red”