China's Zhurong rover has completed its primary three-month-long expedition on Mars but is set to continue exploring the Red Planet.
Space News & Blog Articles
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Flying on Mars getting tougher as Ingenuity helicopter gears up for 14th hop
Image: New radar images show the A-74 iceberg spinning around the western tip of the Brunt Ice Shelf, brushing slightly against it before continuing southwards.
Stunning image shows galactic dance of stars swirling around a supermassive black hole
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After four months of darkness, it is finally time to rise and shine for the crew at Concordia Research Station in Antarctica. The most-welcome Sun finally made its appearance on 11 August and ESA-sponsored medical doctor Nick Smith was not about to miss it.
For nine months Nick and his fellow crew mates have been living and working in one of the most isolated, confined and extreme environments on Earth, with no way in or out of the Station during the winter-over period.
Nick is overseeing experiments in human physiology and biology, atmospheric physics, meteorology, and astronomy, among other disciplines. Along with the rest of the crew, he is also maintaining the base – one of only three to run year-round in the Antarctic.
Four months of complete darkness is quite the challenge, and one researchers are very interested in studying from a physiological and psychological point of view. From questionnaires to blood and stool samples, the crew are poked and prodded to understand how better to prepare humans for deep space travel.
Social dynamics are also of interest to researchers during the period of darkness. Stress brought on by lack of sunlight, changing sleep patterns, fatigue and moodiness can affect the group. The crew are especially encouraged to take on group activities and get creative to combat the isolation of the winter. And not just with their own station crew.
This Week's Sky at a Glance, August 20 – 28
Jupiter ands Saturn are just past opposition, so they dominate the sky all night. They inhabit dim Capricornus, which pushes Sagittarius westward. Venus, even showier, owns the western twilight but sets by full darkness.
The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, August 20 – 28 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
The 12-Year Cycle of Jupiter Oppositions
Jupiter is at opposition on August 19th. If we take the long view — 12 years long — we can watch Jupiter's oppositions as it passes through the zodiac constellations.
The post The 12-Year Cycle of Jupiter Oppositions appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Venus: Thin-skinned and Likely to Blow
Scientists found a strange little volcanic feature on the edge of a Venusian corona, giving further credence to the theory that the planet has a thin outer layer and an active interior.
The post Venus: Thin-skinned and Likely to Blow appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Musk Confirms how “Mechazilla” Will Catch and Assemble Starship and Super Heavy for Rapid Reuse
In January of 2021, Elon Musk announced SpaceX’s latest plan to increase the number of flights they can mount by drastically reducing turnaround time. The key to this was a new launch tower that would “catch” first stage boosters after they return to Earth. This would forego the need to install landing legs on future Super Heavy boosters and potentially future Starship returning to Earth.
Musk shared this idea in response to a Tweet made by an animator who goes by the Twitter handle Erc X, who asked if his latest render (of a Starship landing next to its launch tower) was accurate. As usual, Musk responded via Twitter, saying:
“We’re going to try to catch the Super Heavy Booster with the launch tower arm, using the grid fins to take the load… Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount—ready to refly in under an hour.”
The ground crews at SpaceX’s South Texas Launch Facility near Boca Chica recently finished stacking the nine sections of bolted steel that make up the tower, which now stands about 145 m (440 ft) tall. With this phase complete, the teams can now undergo the process of outfitting the tower with large actuator arms, hydraulic systems, fuel lines, and other components that will convert it into what Musk has affectionately nicknamed “Mechazilla.”
This was likely a reference to the character “Mechagodzilla” from the Godzilla movie franchise, a robotic version of Godzilla that squares off with the original in the 1974 film Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. The moment Musk announced this new tower, people in the space community have been speculating what it might look like. The first to oblige him was a 3D designer (Youtube handle Mini3D) who created an animation based on Musk’s description the very next day.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft returns to processing facility for valve work
After valve problems caused it to miss an opportunity to launch earlier this month on a test flight to the International Space Station, Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule returned to a processing facility at the Kennedy Space Center Thursday after being removed from its Atlas 5 launcher at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
United Launch Alliance detached the Starliner spacecraft from the top of its Atlas 5 rocket Thursday inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral.
A crane lowered the capsule onto a road transporter to ferry the spaceship back to Boeing’s processing facility near the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, where engineers plan to resume troubleshooting stuck valves that prevented the Starliner from launching Aug. 3 on an unpiloted demonstration flight to the space station.
Boeing officials said last week they would give up on fixing the valves while the spacecraft remained on top of its Atlas 5 launcher, a decision prompted by scheduling constraints in the next couple of months, both at the space station and on ULA’s launch manifest at Cape Canaveral.
Live coverage: Soyuz rocket poised for ninth launch of OneWeb satellites
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with 34 OneWeb broadband satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
Arianespace webcast
Roscosmos webcast
Arianespace’s live video stream begins at approximately 6:10 p.m. EDT (2210 GMT) and is in English. Roscosmos’s live video stream begins at approximately 5:20 p.m. EDT (2120 GMT) and is in Russian.
North America is surrounded by 4 storms and wildfire smoke in this satellite view
A stunning new satellite image captures four different storms churning in the skies above North America as the continent nears the peak of hurricane season.
Record temperatures, fire clouds and drought ravage Earth in scorching-hot 2021
2021 is "virtually certain" to be one of the top 10 hottest years on record, and "fire clouds," could become a summer staple, scientists revealed in a monthly briefing today (Aug. 19).
Mars' suspected underground lake could be just volcanic rock, new study finds
A Long March 4B rocket launches a pair of Tianhui 2 mapping satellites. Credit: CASC
China launched a Long March 4B rocket Wednesday carrying two Tianhui radar mapping satellites into orbit more than 300 miles in altitude.
The two satellites will join a similar pair of spacecraft launched in April 2019, working in tandem to bounce radar beams off Earth’s surface to generate detailed three-dimensional global maps.
The satellite mapping system uses a technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar to gather stereo data for 3D topographic maps. The data will be used by Chinese military and civilian agencies.
The two new Tianhui 2 satellites, known as the Tianhui 2-02 pair, took off at 6:32 p.m. EDT (2232 GMT) Wednesday from the Taiyuan launch base in northern China’s Shanxi province atop a Long March 4B rocket.
Liftoff occurred at 6:32 a.m. Thursday Beijing time, kicking off China’s 29th orbital launch attempt of the year.
Svetlana Savitskaya: Second woman in space, 1st female spacewalker
Former cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya was the second woman to go to space, the first woman to perform a spacewalk and the first woman to go to space twice.
Astronomy Jargon 101: Spectrum
In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll get the whole picture with today’s topic: spectrum!
The spectrum of an object is perhaps the most important, the most useful, the most vital measurement one could take in astronomy. The spectrum unlocks everything from the composition of that object to its velocity. Without the knowledge of spectroscopy, we’d be much more confused about the heavens than we are.
It was Isaac Newton himself who discovered that the white light from the sun is actually made a combination of many different colors – the familiar ROYGBIV of the rainbow. Newton was perhaps the first person to measure the spectrum of our sun. He split apart the light from the sun to measure how much of each color was in that light. And that’s essentially what a spectrum is: a measurement of the amount of each wavelength of light coming from an object.
In the early days of modern astronomy, prisms were used to separate the light and create a spectrum. Nowadays astronomers use tools like diffraction gratings. But no matter the technique, the end result is always the same: cracking open a light source to see what’s inside it.
You’ll find a spectrometer – a device for splitting light and measuring the resulting spectrum – at the bottom of pretty much every scientific telescope in the world. One of the many awesome things about spectra is the loads of information packed into it. Even a single pixel is enough to gather the spectrum, and from the spectrum we can learn about the object. Indeed, some of the greatest discoveries in astronomy were made with just spectra.
'The Colony' trailer shows the struggle for survival upon returning to a once-ravaged Earth
Set in the distant future, a female astronaut, shipwrecked on the long-decimated Earth, must decide the fate of the wasteland's remaining populace in "The Colony."
How can we take pictures of Earth-like exoplanets? Use the sun!
If we ever want to take pictures of an Earth-like exoplanet, we need to think bigger than the biggest telescopes on Earth.
Ingenuity’s Flight 12 was a Tricky one, Flying Over Hazardous Terrain
The Ingenuity helicopter on Mars has now completed its 12th flight, where it acted as a scout, looking ahead for dangerous terrain for it’s partner in crime, the Perseverance rover.
The 4-pound autonomous rotocraft climbed over almost 10 meters (33 ft) high, and traveled a total of 450 meters (1,476 ft) in 169 seconds. It flew over the over an area dubbed the ‘South Seitah’ region of Mars, where Perseverance will explore.
“A dozen for the books!” said JPL on Twitter. “The Mars helicopter’s latest flight took us to the geological wonder that is the ‘South Seitah’ region.”
In performing aerial scouting, Ingenuity, aka, captured images that scientists and engineers hope will help determine which of the boulders, rocky outcrops and other geologic features may be worthy of further scrutiny by the rover.
This flight was ambitious and risky, the science team said in a blog post.
Physicists give weird new phase of matter an extra dimension
The new phase of matter behaves like a solid and a frictionless liquid at the same time
Virgin Orbit is buying 2 more rocket-launching planes
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has rolled into a patch of ground that could shed considerable light on the Red Planet's climate history.
Hubble Space Telescope studies peculiar 'ultra-diffuse galaxy' (photo)
If skies are clear this weekend, we’ll see the full Moon. And not just any old full Moon, but the Blue Moon — the “true” Blue Moon.
The post "True" Blue Moon Occurs Sunday, August 22nd appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
