Tag Archives: NASA

NASA: Tom Cruise To Shoot Movie On Space Station

Deadline Hollywood reports: Tom Cruise and Elon Musk’s Space X are working on a project with NASA that would be the first narrative feature film – an action adventure – to be shot in outer space. It’s not a Mission: Impossible film and no studio is in the mix at this stage. There has never been a leading man (Jackie …

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Trump Executive Order Encourages Mining The Moon

The Guardian reports: The world may be racked by the coronavirus, but Donald Trump has less earthly concerns on his mind, too, after signing an executive order encouraging the US to mine the moon for minerals. The executive order makes clear that the US doesn’t view space as a “global commons”, opening the way for the mining of the moon …

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Astronaut’s Estranged Wife Charged Over Space Crime

Space.com reports: NASA astronaut Anne McClain’s estranged wife has been charged with lying about a “space crime” that she alleged McClain committed. In August 2019, the New York Times reported that amid their separation, Summer Worden [photo] complained that McClain had allegedly accessed Worden’s bank account from the International Space Station. The accusation immediately generated a tremendous amount of media …

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NOAA: 2019 Was Second-Hottest Year On Record

The New York Times reports: Last year was the second-hottest on record, government researchers confirmed on Wednesday in analyses of temperature data from thousands of observing stations around the world. They said that 2019 was only slightly cooler than 2016 and the end of what was the warmest decade yet. The independent analyses by researchers at the National Aeronautics and …

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NASA Makes History With First All-Female Spacewalk

The Washington Post reports: NASA made history Friday morning when astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir stepped outside the International Space Station to replace a faulty battery charger. The all-female spacewalk — the first of its kind “in human history,” the agency said — began at 7:38 a.m. Eastern time as the two American astronauts set their suits to battery …

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Emails Show NASA’s Surprise At Near-Miss Asteroid

Buzzfeed News reports: In late July, a record-setting asteroid hurtled just 40,400 miles over Earth, the largest space rock to come so close in a century. But perhaps more alarming than the flyby itself is how much it caught NASA by surprise, according to internal agency documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Spotted just 24 hours before a relatively narrow miss …

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Astronaut Accused Of Accessing Estranged Wife’s Bank Account From Space Station, Possible First Space Crime

The New York Times reports: Summer Worden, a former Air Force intelligence officer living in Kansas, has been in the midst of a bitter separation and parenting dispute for much of the past year. So she was surprised when she noticed that her estranged spouse still seemed to know things about her spending. Had she bought a car? How could …

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Near Miss From Asteroid Surprises Scientists [VIDEO]

The Washington Post reports: Alan Duffy was confused. On Thursday, the astronomer’s phone was suddenly flooded with calls from reporters wanting to know about a large asteroid that had just whizzed past Earth, and he couldn’t figure out “why everyone was so alarmed.” “I thought everyone was getting worried about something we knew was coming,” Duffy, who is lead scientist …

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NASA Unveils Drone Mission To Saturn’s Moon Titan

The Verge reports: A new mission involving a drone-like lander will explore the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The mission — called Dragonfly — received a coveted funding slot from NASA’s New Frontiers program, which funds ambitious missions to explore objects in our Solar System. The Dragonfly mission will send a dual-quadcopter the surface of Titan. It will look like …

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Scientists Detect Huge Mass Below Lunar Crater

Newsweek reports: Scientists have discovered a huge, mysterious mass of material beneath a large crater on the Moon. The mass is five times bigger than Hawaii’s Big Island and is located hundreds of miles beneath the lunar surface. Researchers led by Peter James from Baylor University, Texas, were studying the structure of the South Pole-Aitken Basin. This is an impact …

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Marsquake: NASA Detects Seismic Activity On Mars

Space.com reports: Scientists just felt the Red Planet move under their feet — robotically from millions of miles away, on the stark surface of Mars. On April 6, NASA’s InSight lander sensed its first confirmed marsquake, a phenomenon scientists suspected, but couldn’t confirm, occurred on the neighboring planet. Measuring the Martian equivalent of earthquakes, seismic waves traveling through the interior …

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SpaceX Capsule Makes Milestone Docking With ISS

The Associated Press reports: A sleek American-built capsule with just a test dummy aboard docked smoothly with the International Space Station on Sunday in a big step toward putting the U.S. back in the business of launching astronauts. The white Dragon capsule, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company under contract to NASA, closed in on the orbiting station nearly 260 …

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NASA Declares Mars Rover Dead After 15 Years

The Independent reports: NASA’s Opportunity rover is officially dead, the space agency has said, after it disappeared in a dust storm on Mars. Clearly emotional NASA staff, standing in front of a life-sized replica of the rover, said they had not heard back from the rover and that the mission would come to an end. “I am standing here with …

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NOAA/NASA: 2018 Was Fourth Hottest Year On Record

A joint report from NOAA and NASA: Earth’s long-term warming trend continued in 2018 as persistent warmth across large swaths of land and ocean resulted in the globe’s fourth hottest year in NOAA’s 139-year climate record. The year ranks just behind 2016 (warmest), 2015 (second warmest) and 2017 (third warmest). In separate analyses of global temperatures, scientists from NASA, the …

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TEXAS: Unpaid NASA Employees Asked To Scrub Toilets

The Houston Chronicle reports: The 200 employees at NASA’s Johnson Space Center being asked to work without pay as shutdown surpasses the one month mark now are being asked to do something else for free: clean the bathrooms. A NASA manager tweeted Thursday a photo of a sign asking for volunteers to clean up the bathrooms once a week until …

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Trump Offered NASA Unlimited Funding If They Could Send A Manned Flight To Mars During His First Term

The Hill reports: President Trump in 2017 offered unlimited funding to NASA to send a manned flight to Mars, according to an upcoming book. Prior to a phone call with NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson from the Oval Office in April 2017, Trump pressed Robert Lightfoot Jr., then the acting NASA administrator, for NASA’s plans for Mars, New York Magazine reported …

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NASA Probe Spots Active Volcano On Jovian Moon

Science News reports: NASA’s Juno orbiter has captured images of a volcanic plume on Jupiter’s moon Io during the mission’s 17th flyby of the giant planet. Four instruments onboard Juno — a camera called JunoCam, the Stellar Reference Unit, the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper and the Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph — observed Io for over an hour, providing a glimpse of …

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NASA Probe Sends Back First Images Of Ultima Thule

The New York Times reports: Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman. At a news conference on Wednesday, scientists working with NASA’s New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by on Jan. 1. The scientists now say with confidence that Ultima Thule long ago was …

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NASA Probe Sends Back Signal From Ultima Thule

Engadget reports: NASA now has proof that its New Horizons probe completed its record-setting flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. The mission team confirmed the flypast at 10:31AM Eastern Time after receiving telemetry data indicating that the spacecraft was “healthy.” It technically flew past Ultima Thule at about 12:33AM , but the combination of data collection and the …

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NASA Spacecraft About To Make Record Flyby [VIDEO]

Axios reports: On New Year’s Day, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is expected to make history by conducting the most distant flyby ever, by zooming past an object a billion miles past Pluto. It’s called “Ultima Thule,” meaning “beyond the known world.” The goal of the mission is to learn more about the building blocks of planets. The spacecraft, which is …

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