Florida’s Space Coast is anticipating 32 rocket launches in 2017, according to the USAF’s 45th Space Wing which manages Patrick AFB and the launch region around Cape Canaveral. This is nine more than the amount that launched from the Cape in 2016 (two of which I was lucky enough to be present for) but still…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
Apollo 14 Samples Reveal the True Age of Our Moon
Turns out the Moon is even older than we thought—if just by a few dozen million years. Using samples of lunar material collected by Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell in February 1971, a team of researchers from UCLA, the University of Chicago, and Princeton have determined that the Moon must have formed within the first…
Revisit Our First (and Only) Landing on Titan
When you think of spacecraft landings on other worlds, you probably first think of Mars, the Moon, Venus, and comet 67P (if you’ve been following along over the past couple of years.) But—in addition to the asteroid Eros and hard impacts on a comet and Mercury—Saturn’s moon Titan was also visited by an alien (i.e.,…
“Alien Megastructure” May Actually Be Scraps of an Ingested Planet
For the past couple of years the astronomy world has been abuzz with news of the strange and randomly-occurring dimming of the star KIC 8462852—aka Tabby’s Star—located 1,276 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus and recently observed by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Hypotheses about the cause range from conservative (a transiting cloud of comets) to quite speculative (an “alien megastructure” constructed around the…
X-Ray Observatory Finds Galactic Black Holes Hidden “Like Monsters Under The Bed”
Many if not all galaxies—including our Milky Way—harbor enormous, supermassive black holes at their centers, surrounded by disks of superheated gas and orbiting stars caught in a deadly gravitational grip. When these black holes swallow large amounts of gas or even whole stars, they can fire out huge flares of material and radiation that’s can be seen far across the…
Could This Asteroid Hit Earth? Astronomers Go “Back in Time” to Find the Answer
Astronomers are always watching the skies for observations of near-Earth asteroids—”space rocks” that have orbits close to Earth’s and, in the case of potentially hazardous asteroids (aka PHAs), those whose orbits could actually cross Earth’s and are larger than 150 meters (500 ft) across. When a new one of these is discovered—no small feat considering that…
Asteroid 16 Psyche Could Truly Be a Psychedelic Little World—AND Worth Quadrillions
NASA recently announced the go-ahead for a new Discovery-level mission that would send a spacecraft to explore 16 Psyche, a 130-mile-wide asteroid in the Solar System’s main belt between Mars and Jupiter. 16 Psyche is a relatively small world but is made almost entirely of metals—some of them what we’d consider precious on Earth, like nickel, gold, and…
JWST Isn’t the Next Hubble, It’s the First James Webb
For more than 25 years the Hubble Space Telescope has been giving us unprecedented and breathtaking views of our Universe, looking deep into distant galaxies and revealing the structures and secrets of our own Milky Way. Hubble literally allowed us to rewrite the book(s) on what we know about the Universe, and to this day it’s still going strong. But…
Light and Dark: the Two Faces of Dione
Saturn’s moon Dione (pronounced DEE-oh-nee) is a heavily-cratered, 700-mile-wide world of ice and rock, its surface slashed by signature “wispy lines” that mark the bright faces of sheer ice cliffs. But Dione has some strange colorations too, evident here in a global map created in 2014 from Cassini images. Its leading half—the side that faces “forward” as…
Hubble Detects Dusty Shadows Hinting at a Hidden Exoplanet
When searching nearby stars for exoplanets, astronomers typically either look for the dimming of the stars’ light as planets pass in front of them or try to see if the stars themselves exhibit a slight wobble due to the gravitational tug of orbiting worlds. But recently scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have found a curious…
Eppur Si Muove: Galileo’s Big Night, 407 Years Ago Today
407 years ago tonight, on January 7, 1610, the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei looked up at a brilliantly-shining Jupiter through his own handmade telescope and saw three bright little “stars” next to it, stirring his natural scientific curiosity. Further observations over the next several nights showed that the planet wasn’t moving relative to the little “stars” as it…
After 15 Years NASA’s TIMED Spacecraft Keeps On Ticking
It may not be the first (or even second or third) satellite mission that comes to mind but NASA and JHUAPL’s TIMED mission continues to deliver invaluable data about Earth’s upper atmosphere over 15 years after its launch on Dec. 7, 2001. In fact its extended long-duration stay in orbit has allowed TIMED (Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics)…
Lights in the Dark 