After more than a month offline in orbit, the famed Hubble Space Telescope is back in action and snapping photos of the cosmos.
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STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION
Oliver Daemen, Wally Funk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Bezos receive a briefing at the New Shepard launch site. Credit: Blue OriginNine days after being upstaged by Richard Branson, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is finally ready for his own flight into history, blasting off Tuesday morning aboard a fully automated spacecraft he believes will usher in a new era of commercial passenger service.
Reaching a slightly higher altitude than Branson’s winged spaceplane, Bezos’ New Shepard capsule is equipped with the largest windows ever built into a spacecraft, offering its briefly weightless passengers truly out-of-this-world views of planet Earth more than 62 miles below.
More important for the safety-conscious, perhaps, the capsule features a flight-tested abort system designed to quickly propel the ship and its passengers away from a malfunctioning booster.
Like Branson before him, Bezos’ presence aboard his New Shepard spacecraft is a public show of confidence in its readiness, after 15 successful but unpiloted test flights, to begin sub-orbital flights for wealthy space tourists and researchers flying at government or corporate expense.
Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three crewmates received 14 hours of training over the last two days for their launch into space on July 20.
We know of four fundamental forces of nature, with no signs of a fifth. But dark matter and dark energy make up over 90% of all the contents of the universe. So the question remains: could there be a fifth force hiding in the “dark sector” of our universe?
There’s something really funky going on with dark matter and dark energy. Besides the fact that we have no real idea of what they are made of, they are oddly coincidental. Dark matter makes up around 25% of all the contents of the universe, while dark energy makes up about 70%. Normal matter, like stars and planets and humans, make up the rest.
In the distant past, those numbers were far different. Our universe was far smaller, so the density of dark matter was much higher. On the other hand, the density of dark energy stays constant, so the total amount of dark energy goes up as the universe gains more volume. In the past, dark energy was barely present.
In the far, far future, the scenario will be reversed. Dark matter will be so diluted that it will be basically nonexistent, while the universe will be so huge that dark energy will make up essentially all the contents.
But right now, in the precise moment when humans can make these kinds of observations, dark matter and dark energy are caught in the act of transitioning, with both of them contributing roughly equally to the energy budget of the universe.
The Perseid meteor shower burst into light this July and will escalate into August as Earth passes through the long trail left by Comet Swift-Tuttle. This month, though, the moon may interfere with the show. Here's how and when to see the Perseids.
After more than a month in safe mode, the Hubble Space Telescope is back online. A wonky power regulator circuit may be to blame.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft emerges from the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing facility early Saturday. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now
Boeing second Starliner crew ferry spacecraft rolled out of its factory early Saturday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for mounting on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket set for liftoff July 30 on a redo of a problem-plagued unpiloted test flight in 2019.
The human-rated spaceship, which has yet to be cleared to fly astronauts, emerged from Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility near NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building before dawn Saturday, riding a spacecraft transporter for the several-mile journey to ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility at the nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
ULA’s ground crew attached a four-point lifting sling for the overhead crane in the VIF to hoist the Starliner spacecraft atop the Atlas 5 rocket, which was already stacked on a mobile launch platform inside the vertical hangar.
Teams completed work to attach the spacecraft to the Atlas 5 rocket over the weekend, setting the stage for an integrated systems test, a “tip-to-tail” checkout of the entire vehicle.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft emerges from the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing facility early Saturday. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight NowBoeing is gearing up for the second unpiloted orbital test flight of a Starliner spacecraft, a redo of the company’s first Starliner demonstration mission in December 2019. Software problems prevented the spacecraft from docking with the International Space Station on that mission, resulting in a premature but successful landing of the capsule in New Mexico.
The first Blue Origin crew will not wear spacesuits during their 11-minute journey to space and back Tuesday (July 20), according to founder and flight crew member Jeff Bezos.
The first Asian American to reach space, Ellison Onizuka, who made the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of NASA's goals, is the namesake for Northrop Grumman's next cargo spacecraft set to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.
Observations of the nearest radio galaxy, Centaurus A, provide the highest-resolution look at the long jets shooting from the galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
The post Event Horizon Telescope Reveals Curious Jet Structure from Black Hole appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos offered her a seat on the first crewed flight of his space tourism enterprise Blue Origin, it was an invitation aviator Wally Funk had waited six decades to receive.
New images obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) reveal a powerful jet ejected from a supermassive black hole in unprecedented detail.
As of 2020, there were over 19,000 pieces of individually tracked space junk in orbit above the Earth. Of those, a mere 2,200 were operational satellites. As more and more satellites go up, the risk of collisions increases. And what are governments doing to stop it? Basically, nothing.
In addition to the 19,000 known pieces of space junk, there’s an estimated 15,000 pieces larger than 10cm across whipping around the Earth. There are an estimated one million pieces larger than a centimeter.
In 2007, the Chinese government conducted an anti-satellite missile test by launching a “kinetic kill vehicle” (essentially a rocket-fired bullet) at a defunct weather satellite. That single incident generated over 3,000 tracked and monitored pieces of space junk, many of which remain in orbit today.
On February 10, 2009 a communications satellite managed by the Iridium company collided with an old Russian military satellite. Both satellites were obliterated, leading to over 2,000 cataloged pieces of space junk.
As satellite-based internet companies continue to launch fleets of “mega-constellations” into orbit, the risk of collisions is only growing with time.
After a tense month, the Hubble Space Telescope resumed operations this past weekend.
The post NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Is Back in Action appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Summertime means it’s time to play ball! But what would it be like to play ball on various locations across our Solar System? Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue has put together a fun animation of how quickly an object falls on to the surfaces of places like the Sun, Earth, Ceres, Jupiter, the Moon, and Pluto.
The animation shows a ball dropping from 1 kilometer to the surface of each object, assuming no air resistance. You can compare, for example, that it takes 2.7 seconds for a ball to drop that distance on the Sun, while it takes 14.3 seconds Earth.
“This should give an idea for the pull you would feel on each object,” O’Donoghue said.
But what about the pull of gravity on the big planets vs. Earth? Interestingly enough, it takes and 13.8 seconds for the ball to drop on Saturn, and 15 seconds on Uranus.
“It might be surprising to see large planets have a pull comparable to smaller ones at the surface,” O’Donoghue said on Twitter. “For example Uranus pulls the ball down slower than at Earth! Why? Because the low average density of Uranus puts the surface far away from the majority of the mass. Similarly, Mars is nearly twice the mass of Mercury, but you can see the surface gravity is actually the same… this indicates that Mercury is much denser than Mars.”
Why is the universe the way it is? Over the years, scientists have explored many ways to explain the cosmos, leading to some crazy-sounding ideas.
Despite numerous attempts, astronomers have not yet confirmed the detection of an exomoon, a moon orbiting a planet around a distant star.
Astronomers have discovered a quartet of teenage planets, according to data from NASA's TESS telescope.
