Space News & Blog Articles

The launch of NASA's CAPSTONE moon mission has been delayed at least two additional days, to no earlier than Monday (June 27).

A monitoring camera on ESA’s BepiColombo mission captured this black-and-white view of a heavily cratered region on Mercury during a June 23 flyby. Volcanic plains are also visible in this image, which was captured from a distance of 873 miles (1,406 kilometers) from Mercury. Credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM

Following up on a first pass last year, the European-Japanese BepiColombo mission flew by Mercury again Thursday for a gravity assist to continue reshaping its course, setting up for a maneuver in 2025 to settle in an orbit around the planet closest to the sun.

The BepiColombo spacecraft snapped photos of Mercury during the flyby Thursday, offering scientists tantalizing glimpses of the rugged, cratered landscape the mission will observe and study later this decade.

“Mercury flyby 1 images were good, but flyby 2 images are even better,” said David Rothery of the Open University, who leads the European Space Agency’s Mercury surface and composition working group. “The images highlight many of the science goals that we can address when BepiColombo gets into orbit. I want to understand the volcanic and tectonic history of this amazing planet.”

BepiColombo’s three black-and-white monitoring cameras and several of the mission’s magnetic, plasma and particle monitoring instruments collected data during the flyby Thursday, which took the spacecraft about 120 miles (200 kilometers) from Mercury’s surface at 5:44 a.m. EDT (0944 GMT).

The robotic mission flew closest to Mercury over the nighttime part of the planet. BepiColombo’s monitoring cameras started taking pictures about give minutes after closest approach, at a range of about 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Mercury, and recorded imagery for about 40 minutes, according to ESA, which operates the mission from a control center in Darmstadt, Germany.

A rare planetary alignment will peak predawn on Friday (June 24) when the crescent moon joins the party. An alignment like this will not occur again until 2040.

New footage shows the mysterious auroral phenomenon called STEVE emerging from a blood-red arc of light in New Zealand in 2015.

Mapping the Milky Way is a task similar in scope and size to the Human Genome Project. Here, we look at the journey of data collected by the Gaia telescope as it reveals the galaxy's secrets.

Planetary scientists have created a new, detailed map of the asteroid Psyche, providing a tantalizing preview of the target for a NASA mission set to launch later this year.

Image: Lunar science stirring on Mount Etna

The Mercury-bound space probe BepiColombo has taken its second look at its target planet today during a superclose flyby designed to slow it down and adjust its trajectory.

Astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling around a single large star.

Astronomers have mapped Orion in 3D to understand the origin of the large arc of Barnard’s Loop — and you can interact with the 3D image!

The post Supernovae Swept Out Barnard's Loop in Orion appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The second segment of SpaceX’s Starship launch tower was lifted at pad 39A Thursday morning. Credit: Spaceflight Now

The second section of the Florida launch tower for SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy and Starship rocket was lifted on top of the first tower segment Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center, continuing construction of a structure that will stand more than 400 feet tall.

SpaceX transferred the second metal tower segment — itself as tall as a five-story building — from a staging and construction site at the company’s Roberts Road at the Kennedy Space Center facility to Launch Complex 39A Wednesday night. A large crane at pad 39A lifted the second tower section onto the lower segment Thursday morning.

The first section of the orbital launch tower rolled out to pad 39A on June 15, and was raised into position on the tower’s foundation Monday. Four more tower segments are visible at the Roberts Road property, where SpaceX is fabricating individual sections of the Starship pad before moving them to pad 39A.

The Starship launch pad in Florida is expected to resemble the tower SpaceX built last year at Boca Chica Beach in Texas, where the company plans to launch the Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket on its first orbital test flight. Operational Super Heavy and Starship missions will likely launch from Florida, according to statements from Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO.

The launch pad tower under construction at pad 39A sits about 1,000 feet, or 300 meters, east of the location where SpaceX launches Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets carrying satellites and astronauts into orbit.

After half a year of commissioning in space, the James Webb Space Telescope will release its first science images in July. Here's how you can tune in to the historic event for free.

Levels of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, continued their unrelenting rise in 2020 despite the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A team of scientists, from the University of Leeds, have used data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite to pinpoint locations with large surges of methane emissions. These findings were presented during ESA’s Living Planet Symposium which took place last month in Bonn, Germany.

Big, brutal, comparatively slow but this lens has world-beating zoom capabilities.

Sifting through data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey, scientists have observed an object that might be a "​​pulsar wind nebula."

The moon will appear to hop over Uranus in the predawn sky as it continues its planetary tour. The event will occur between Friday (June 24) and Saturday (June 25).

Lego NASA Apollo 11 Lunar Lander is a set that doesn’t quite live up to its intergalactic potential.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a white dwarf star devouring material from its own system, suggesting that water and other volatiles might be common in the outer reaches of planetary systems.

The first stage for ULA’s next Atlas 5 launch was stacked on a mobile platform May 27 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Credit: United Launch Alliance

United Launch Alliance teams at Cape Canaveral are in the final week of preparations for the next flight of an Atlas 5 rocket, set for liftoff with two U.S. military technology demonstration satellites June 30, a one-day delay after bad weather held up launch processing.

The mission is one of 23 Atlas 5 rockets remaining to fly before ULA retires the Atlas launcher family in favor of the next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket.

ULA personnel began stacking the Atlas 5 rocket May 27 inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with the raising of the launcher’s first stage onto the mobile platform that will carry it to the launch pad.

The first stage was stacked on the mobile launch platform eight days after the previous Atlas 5 launch May 19, which carried Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule into orbit on a test flight to the International Space Station.

Teams added four Northrop Grumman-built solid rocket boosters, which will provide extra thrust in the first minute-and-a-half of the flight, firing in unison with the core stage’s Russian-made RD-180 engine. Then ULA installed the Centaur upper stage, with a single Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engine.

Ariane 5 has delivered two telecommunications satellites, MEASAT-3d and GSAT-24, into their planned geostationary transfer orbits.