Our Sun continues to demonstrate its awesome power in a breathtaking collection of recent images taken by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Daniel Inouye Solar Telescope, aka Inouye Solar Telescope, which is the world’s largest and most powerful ground-based solar telescope. These images, taken by one of Inouye’s first-generation instruments, the Visible-Broadband Imager (VBI), …
Star formation is one of the oldest processes in the Universe. In the Milky Way and most other galaxies, it unfolds in cold, dark creches of gas and dust. Astronomers study sites of star formation to understand the process. Even though they know much about it, some aspects remain mysterious. That’s particularly true for the …
File photo of Virgin Orbit’s carrier aircraft and a LauncherOne rocket under its wing. Credit: Virgin Orbit Virgin Orbit, the satellite launch company founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, has permanently ceased operations, just a few months after a major mission failure in January and at a time when it was already facing financial headwinds. …
California residents will be glad to know their reservoirs are nearly full again after years of drought. New satellite photos show the levels of Shasta Lake, California’s largest reservoir, going from 31% capacity last November to nearly 100% in May 2023. The reservoir was filled with heavy rains and a significant mountain snowpack that melted …
Phew, California’s Largest Reservoir is Nearly Full Read More »
NASA believes in getting the public excited about space, and they’re carrying on this tradition by recently announcing that space fans from around the world can travel to Jupiter with the Europa Clipper mission. Though, not literally, but by adding their names to a microchip for the “Message in a Bottle” campaign that will also …
NASA’s Europa Clipper Taking “Message in a Bottle” to Jupiter Read More »
Things tend to move from the simple to the complex when you’re trying to understand something new. This is the situation exoplanet scientists find themselves in when it comes to the term ‘habitable.’ When they were discovering the first tranche of exoplanets, the term was useful. It basically meant that the planet could have liquid …
When a mission to Mars reaches 20 years of service, that’s definitely reason to celebrate. ESA’s Mars Express celebrated by airing the first-ever livestream of images, sent directly from the Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) on board the spacecraft. For an hour, it sent back images from the Red Planet in as close to real-time as …
We can gaze out into regions in our neighbourhood of the Milky Way and find orgies of star birth. The closest region is in the Orion nebula, where astronomers have identified more than 700 young stars. They range from only 100,000 years—mere infancy for a star—to over a million years. But we’re more than 13 …
JWST Shows How the Early Universe Was Furiously Forming Stars Read More »
Artist’s illustration of the Starship landing system on the moon. Credit: SpaceX A senior NASA official raised concerns Wednesday that “difficulties” with SpaceX’s development of the huge new Starship rocket could delay the Artemis program’s first moon landing with astronauts from late 2025, a mission that will use a derivative of the Starship vehicle to …
NASA concerned SpaceX’s Starship schedule could delay moon landing Read More »
Watch our live coverage of the Flight Readiness Firing for United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Follow us on Twitter. SFN Live United Launch Alliance’s first Vulcan Centaur rocket is back on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral for a critical test-firing of its Blue Origin-built BE-4 main engines …
Test-firing of ULA’s first Vulcan rocket on tap today Read More »
