Space and astronomy news
When it comes to brand recognition, Airstream‘s got game. Their silver, space-age looking travel trailers and touring coaches are iconic. Almost everyone recognizes their riveted aluminum bodies.
Continue reading “Boeing and Airstream Show off Their New Astronaut Transport Vehicle: the Astrovan II”
Rigorous testing is at the heart of any successful space mission. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be a million miles away when it deploys its mission-critical sun-shield, and if it doesn’t function as planned, that’s it. Game over.
Continue reading “James Webb Tests its Sun-Shield. So Far, So Good.”
It’s time to update the rules. That’s the conclusion of a panel that examined NASA’s rules for planetary protection. It was smart, at the dawn of the space age, to think about how we might inadvertently pollute other worlds with Earthly microbes as we explore the Solar System. But now that we know a lot more than we did back then, the rules don’t fit.
Continue reading “A NASA Panel Says We Don’t Need to be so Careful About Infecting Other Worlds”
400 photos. 11 minutes. That’s what it took to create this time-lapse of the Earth and stars as the International Space Station over Namibia toward the Red Sea. NASA astronaut Christina Koch captured these images.
Continue reading “Time-lapse Captured from the International Space Station”
There’s a problem with Venus. We don’t know how fast it rotates. For a space-faring civilization like ours, that’s a problem.
Measuring the length of day, or rotation rate, of most bodies is pretty straightforward. Mark a prominent surface feature and time how long it takes to rotate 360 degrees. But Venus is blanketed in thick clouds. Those clouds give it its reflectivity, and make it bright and noticeable in the sky, but they make it hard to measure Venus’ day length.
Continue reading “How Long is a Day on Venus? Astronomers Make Their Best Measurement Yet”
After months of setbacks, NASA says that the InSight Lander’s Mole is working again.
InSight landed on Mars on Nov. 26 2018 in Elysium Planitia. Its mission is to study the interior of the planet, to learn about how Mars and other rocky planets formed. InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) is a NASA mission with other partners, including the DLR (German Aerospace Center.)
Continue reading “Success! NASA Confirms the Mole is Working Again.”
If the Curiosity rover was paranoid, would it feel like it was being watched? Well, it is being watched, by its brother in orbit, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The MRO watched Curiosity as it travelled through the ‘Clay-Bearing Unit‘ in Gale Crater, during June and July, 2019.
Continue reading “There’s the Curiosity Rover, On the Move, Seen from Space”
Leave it up to the good ole Hubble Space Telescope. The workhorse telescope has given us a photo of the new interstellar comet 2I/Borisov. Take that, fancy new telescopes.
Continue reading “Here’s the Picture We’ve Been Waiting for. Hubble’s Photo of Interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov”
NASA is developing new spacesuits for their Artemis program. The new suits will give the astronauts greater mobility, will be safer, and will be designed from the ground up to fit women.
Continue reading “NASA’s New Lunar Spacesuit is Going to be a Lot More Comfortable for Astronauts”
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe. The brightest ones are so luminous they outshine a trillion stars. But why? And what does their brightness tell us about the galaxies that host them?
To try to answer that question, a group of astronomers took another look at 28 of the brightest and nearest quasars. But to understand their work, we have to back track a little, starting with supermassive black holes.
Continue reading “Some Quasars Shine With the Light of Over a Trillion Stars”