"A strong magnetic field is very important for life on a planet."
The four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission went into quarantine on Jan. 23, keeping everything on track for a possible launch in early February.
Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, and Darth Vader are coming to Batuu!
Comets inhabit the cold reaches of the Solar System: the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. Occasionally, one passes through the inner Solar System, but mostly they keep to themselves out there. These dirty snowballs are agglomerations of rock and dust, and frozen volatiles like water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. They also contain organic materials.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a young star flinging heat-formed crystals outward on a cosmic conveyor belt, offering a new clue to how comets evolve.
The Artemis 2 moon mission will send a swatch from the famous Wright Flyer, along with a number of other aerospace artifacts, when it launches in the coming weeks.
Scientists have known that Mars has water for some years, documenting ice beneath the surface, moisture locked in soil, and vapour drifting through the thin atmosphere. The challenge facing future human missions isn't finding water on the Red Planet, it’s figuring out how to actually extract and use it.
Sometimes astronomers don't need giant telescopes to observe the wonders of the cosmos; they just need to look up at the night sky.
Stars change in brightness for all kinds of reasons, but all of them are interesting to astronomers at some level. So imagine their excitement when a star known as J0705+0612 (or, perhaps more politically incorrectly, ASASSN-24fw) dropped to around 2.5% of its original brightness for 8.5 months. Two new papers - one from Nadia Zakamska and her team at the Gemini Telescope South and one from Raquel Forés-Toribio at Ohio State and her co-authors - examine this star and have come to the same conclusion - it’s likely being caused by a circumsecondary disk.
Space debris encompasses thousands of defunct satellites, spent rocket stages, and fragments from collisions or explosions that orbit Earth at speeds exceeding 27,000 kilometres per hour. This growing population of human made junk poses collision risks to operational spacecraft and, when gravity eventually pulls larger pieces down through the atmosphere, can threaten people on the ground with falling fragments that sometimes survive reentry intact.
Bacteria and the viruses that infect them have been locked in an evolutionary battle for billions of years. Bacteria evolve defences against viral infection and viruses develop new ways to breach those defences. This process shapes microbial ecosystems across Earth, from ocean depths to soil communities. But what happens when you take that battle to space?
Exhaust from lunar landers drifts across the moon and contaminates ultra-cold polar craters that are rich in ancient ice and organic clues, a new study reports.
Sculpted gases in the Helix Nebula, revealed in a new Webb image, look like the firework-like tendrils in a distant amateur-discovered supernova remnant — here's why.
The European Space Agency’s innovative Biomass satellite is now fully commissioned, opening free access to a powerful new stream of data that promise a step change in our understanding of forest dynamics and their role in regulating the global carbon cycle.
SpaceX will launch an advanced, jam-resistant GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force from Florida on Tuesday night (Jan. 27), and you can watch the action live.
'There will be loss. There will be sacrifice. We must all face judgment for the evils of our past'
"These results from the Dark Energy Survey shine new light on our understanding of the universe and its expansion."
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On 17 January, the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft were rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to Launch Pad 39B. The 6.5-km journey took around 12 hours and was carried out using NASA's crawler-transporter, which has been moving rockets to launch pads for over 50 years.
The GPS 3 Space Vehicle 09 satellite is encapsulated inside Falcon 9 rocket payload fairings at Astrotech Space Operations in Titusville, Florida. Image: SpaceX
The U.S. Space Force is set to send its ninth third-generation Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite into medium Earth orbit on Monday night. The satellite will ride to space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket after the government moved the spacecraft from a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket.
Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs), which reside at the center of many galaxies, play a central role in the evolution of these cosmic structures. This includes how they power Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs), in which the core region emits enough radiation and light to temporarily outshine all the stars in the disk. They also "seesaw" between relativistic jets emanating from their poles to outflows of jets that suppress star formation in the surrounding core. Despite this broad understanding, scientists have been waiting for the day when they can peer directly into the heart of a galaxy's core and see what's going on there.
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