ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket, with a lightning strike in the background, during Thursday evening’s countdown. Credit: United Launch Alliance
Officials scrubbed the launch of an Atlas 5 rocket for the U.S. Space Force Thursday due to the risk of lightning from nearby thunderstorms, delaying the liftoff of the $1.1 billon mission until Friday evening.
Within the Solar System, most of our astrobiological research is aimed at Mars, which is considered to be the next-most habitable body beyond Earth. However, future efforts are aimed at exploring icy satellites in the outer Solar System that could also be habitable (like Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and more). This dichotomy between terrestrial (rocky) planets that orbit within their a system’s Habitable Zones (HZ) and icy moons that orbit farther from their parent stars is expected to inform future extrasolar planet surveys and astrobiology research.
Making a 3D map of our galaxy would be easier if some stars behaved long enough to get good distances to them. However, red supergiants are the frisky kids on the block when it comes to pinning down their exact locations. That’s because they appear to dance around, which makes pinpointing their place in space difficult. That wobble is a feature, not a bug of these massive old stars and scientists want to understand why.
The United States Space Force has activated a new unit that is tasked with providing "critical intelligence on threat systems, foreign intentions and activities in the space domain."
Stars form inside massive clouds of gas and dust called molecular clouds. The Nebular Hypothesis explains how that happens. According to that hypothesis, dense cores inside those clouds of hydrogen collapse due to instability and form stars. The Nebular Hypothesis is much more detailed than that short version, but that’s the basic idea.
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission, known as USSF 12, will launch the U.S. Space Force’s Wide Field of View Testbed satellite and the USSF 12 Ring spacecraft into geosynchronous orbit. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifts off from the Indian east coast with three Singaporean satellites. Credit: ISRO
Three Singaporean satellites lifted off Thursday on an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and rocketed into an orbit more than 350 miles above Earth to begin missions supporting military surveillance, technology demonstrations, and solar research.
NASA plans to start rolling its Artemis 1 moon mission off the launch pad early Friday morning (July 1), and you can watch the slow-moving action live.
The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle discovered on July 4, 2012, by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN, Switzerland.
40 years ago director Steven Spielberg introduced audiences to a benevolent alien in "E.T" the Extra-Terrestrial
Disk Detective, a citizen science project dedicated identifying planet-forming disks around young stars, reports their latest results.
This episode marks a welcome return to Trademark Trek Tomfoolery.
Image: Copernicus Sentinel-1 maps Bangladesh flood
From returning greats to brand new shows, these are the best upcoming sci-fi TV shows for 2022.
Astronomers have finally ruled out that one of the highest-risk asteroids seen in years will hit Earth in 2052.
The MoveShootMove Star Tracker could be the perfect place to start for aspiring astrophotographers but how does it hold up in real life?
Magnetars are some of the most fascinating astronomical objects. One teaspoon of the stuff they are made out of would weigh almost one billion tons, and they have magnetic fields that are hundreds of millions of times more powerful than any magnetic that exists today on Earth. But we don’t know much about how they form. A new paper points to one possible source – mergers of neutron stars.
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle with the DS-EO, NeuSAR, and SCOOB 1 satellites for Singapore. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is scheduled to launch two satellites for the U.S. military on Thursday (June 30), and you can watch the action live.
See the moon glow with Earthshine this weekend. The phenomenon occurs when sunlight is reflected off Earth and back toward the moon shortly after sunset.
A NASA JPL concept aims to send tiny swimming robots to explore oceans on other planets and moons in our solar system.
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