Astronomy

JWST Shows How the Early Universe Was Furiously Forming Stars

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 …

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20 Years of Mars Express Images Helped Build This Mosaic of the Red Planet

The Mars Express orbiter, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) first interplanetary mission, entered orbit around Mars on June 2nd, 2003. Since then, the probe has mapped the Martian surface using its High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), an instrument built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) with commercial partners. In honor of the mission’s 20th anniversary, a …

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New Satellite Successfully Beams Power From Space

Solar power is the fastest-growing form of renewable energy and currently accounts for 3.6% of global electricity production today. This makes it the third largest source of the renewable energy market, followed by hydroelectric power and wind. These three methods are expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, reaching 40% by 2035 and 45% …

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Japanese space science missions facing delays after H3 rocket failure

The spacecraft for the Japanese-led X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, undergoes acoustic testing in Japan in December 2022. Credit: JAXA The launch of a Japanese X-ray telescope and robotic lunar lander has been delayed to no earlier than August, and the launch schedule for another Japanese mission to return samples from a moon …

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NASA blames recent Hubble woes on aging hardware

The Hubble Space Telescope, seen from the space shuttle Columbia at the end of a 2002 servicing mission. The observatory’s door is open in this picture. Credit: NASA Hardware problems that cropped up earlier this month on the Hubble Space Telescope, now approaching the 31st anniversary of its launch, are the latest signs the observatory …

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Hubble resumes science observations after software error

The Hubble Space Telescope in the payload bay of space shuttle Atlantis during the last servicing mission in May 2009. Credit: NASA NASA has partially restored the Hubble Space Telescope to science mode after a software error temporarily halted observations, but engineers continue studying a problem that kept the telescope’s aperture door from closing and …

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