Space and astronomy news
We may take it for granted, but every day we receive picture postcards from the robotic travelers we have sent out to explore our Solar System. Usually, we get to see faraway planets, moons, asteroids, or comets. But sometimes we get to see ourselves. The Lucy spacecraft took a couple of amazing images of our …
Continue reading “Lucy Took This Picture of Earth as it was Making its Gravity Assist Maneuver”
There is still so much we don’t know about the asteroids. Various missions have already been sent to some near Earth and in the asteroid belt, but there are just so many that it is hard to keep track of them all. Lucy, NASA’s mission to the Trojan asteroids, is supposed to help with that, …
Continue reading “Another of the Lucy Mission’s Asteroids has a Moon”
Astronomers will go to great lengths for science. Recently, dozens of astronomers had the misfortune of traveling to one of the most tempting locales in the southwestern US – Las Vegas. But they weren’t there for the city’s bright lights – they were there to observe a very dim light of a star thousands of light-years …
Continue reading “Astronomers Lined up Under an Asteroid’s Shadow to Measure its Size Precisely”
An early morning launch is planned for the Lucy spacecraft, the first space mission to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. Tomorrow, October 16 at 5:34 a.m. EDT is the first day and time in Lucy’s 21-day launch window, and current weather conditions show a 90% chance of favorable conditions for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force …
Continue reading “NASA’s Mission to Visit 8 Asteroids, Lucy, Launches on October 16th”
A new study out this month suggests that Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids may be more peculiar than previously thought. The Trojan asteroids are rocky objects which orbit the Sun just ahead of and just behind the gas giant, in gravitational sweet spots known as Lagrange points. The swarm ahead of Jupiter, known as the L4 (Greek) …
NASA has announced the two missions that will make up Discovery 13 and 14, both of which are robotic missions to study the history of the early Solar System.
In February of 2014, NASA’s Discovery Program put out the call for mission proposals, one or two of which will have the honor of taking part in Discovery Mission Thirteen. Hoping to focus the next round of exploration efforts to places other than Mars, the five semifinalists (which were announced this past September) include proposed …
Continue reading “Surveying the “Fossils of Planet Formation”: The Lucy Mission”