Tag Archives: outer space

Reuters reports: Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space program. Russia’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft at 11:57 GMT on Saturday after …

Space.com reports: After traveling almost a million miles, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reached its final destination today (Jan. 24). The most powerful observatory ever to launch to space, the James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on Dec. 25, 2021 to explore the cosmos and our universe’s earliest milestones. Since its successful takeoff, the $10 billion telescope has been busy …

The Washington Post reports: NASA’s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope is finally in space. The Webb, charged with seeing deeper into the universe than any telescope ever built, blasted off right on time at 7:20 a.m. Saturday from the European Space Agency’s spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on South America’s northeast coast. At launch, the $10 billion telescope, NASA’s long-delayed …

National Geographic reports: After more than a quarter-century of planning, designing, building, waiting—and of obsessively testing the most complex space observatory ever assembled—the mammoth James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch at 7:20 a.m. eastern time on December 25. For JWST’s mission to succeed, the telescope must execute an intricate series of carefully choreographed maneuvers during its first month …

The Verge reports: Astronomers just discovered a treasure trove of “rogue planets” — free-floating planets that don’t orbit a star but exist all by their lonesome in the depths of space. With masses comparable to that of Jupiter, the 70 or more rogue planets spotted throughout the Milky Way galaxy are the largest such group of cosmic nomads ever found. …

CNN reports: The US is concerned that Russia carried out a major anti-satellite weapons test over the weekend, two US officials told CNN. One of the officials said it may have created a potentially dangerous debris field in space. US Space Command confirmed that a rare and potentially dangerous “debris-generating event” took place but did not provide details or mention …

The Verge reports: SpaceX is set to launch the first fully private crew of passengers to orbit on Wednesday. The Inspiration4 crew, three ordinary people and a billionaire philanthropist who’s funding the mission, will board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule on Wednesday afternoon and lift off at 8:02PM ET atop a Falcon 9 rocket, speeding toward an orbit 360 miles above …

ABC News reports: Richard Branson will boldly go where no space baron has gone before on Sunday, when he steps onto the supersonic space plane from his rocket venture, Virgin Galactic. Branson’s brief joy ride is more than two decades in the making. He founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 with the goal of creating a winged spacecraft capable of taking …

NBC News reports: Debris from a rocket launched by China crashed back to Earth on Sunday, landing in the Indian Ocean, according to China’s space agency, after days of speculation over when or where it could end up. Parts of the Long March 5B rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 a.m. Beijing time (10:24 p.m. ET), the China Manned Space …

The BBC reports: The first privately funded mission to the Moon has crashed on the lunar surface after the apparent failure of its main engine. The Israeli spacecraft – called Beresheet – attempted a soft landing, but had several technical and communication problems. The aim of the mission was to take pictures and conduct experiments. Only government space agencies from …

The Independent reports: An international scientific team on Wednesday announced a milestone in astrophysics – the first-ever photo of a black hole – using a global network of telescopes to gain insight into celestial objects with gravitational fields so strong no matter or light can escape. The research was conducted by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, an international collaboration …

Science News reports: Astronomers have spotted a second repeating fast radio burst, and it looks a lot like the first. The existence of a second repeating burst suggests there could be many more of the mysterious signals in the cosmos. The burst, called FRB 180814.J0422+73, is one of 13 newly discovered fast radio bursts, or FRBs — brief, bright signals …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Clip recap: The New Horizons mission will help us understand worlds at the edge of our solar system by making the first reconnaissance of the dwarf planet Pluto and by venturing deeper into the distant, mysterious Kuiper Belt – a relic of solar system formation. Following a January 2006 launch, New Horizons is currently about 2.95 billion miles from home; …

Obama is going to arm and deputize the Bloods and the Crips for the coming uprising against true American patriots! And other stuff!

Via the Telegraph: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has captured dramatic footage of a powerful X-class solar flare erupting on the surface of the Sun. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however – when intense enough – they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals …