Today’s the red planet day! NASA’s Perseverance rover is arriving at Mars and will soon enter its atmosphere at over 12,000 mph and, using a combination of ablative heat shield, enormous parachute, a sky-crane with retrorockets, and eventually a series of cables, carefully touch down onto the surface near the western edge of a 28-mile-wide…
Category: News
Two Days to Mars!
It’s almost time! In just two days—or “sols,” if you’re counting in Mars time—NASA’s newest, biggest and most advanced rover ever, named Perseverance, will touch down on Mars, making it the fifth mobile wheeled robot ever to explore the surface of the Red Planet and the third robot currently in operation on Mars. And if…
For the Umpteenth Time No NASA Didn’t Change the Zodiac
Come on everyone, no. Just…no. NASA did not “change your star sign.” NASA neither creates “star signs” nor names or changes them. This is because 1. that’s not NASA’s job, and 2. “star signs”—i.e., astrology—is junk science. (And that’s being grossly generous with the term “science.”)
NASA Names D.C. Headquarters After “Hidden Figure” Mary W. Jackson
(News from NASA on June 24, 2020) NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Wednesday the agency’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C., will be named after Mary W. Jackson, the first African American female engineer at NASA.
CHIME Detects First FRB with a Periodic Pattern, “Like Clockwork”
News from MIT on June 17, 2020 A team of astronomers, including researchers at MIT, has picked up on a curious, repeating rhythm of fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from an unknown source outside our galaxy, 500 million light years away.
Space Telescope Named After Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s First Chief of Astronomy
From NASA on May 20, 2020: NASA is naming its next-generation space telescope currently under development, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe. The newly-named Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope – or Roman…
First Look at the James Webb Space Telescope Folded in Fully Stowed Configuration
News from NASA: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has been successfully folded and stowed into the same configuration it will have when loaded onto an Ariane 5 rocket for launch next year. Webb is NASA’s largest and most complex space science telescope ever built. Too big for any rocket available in its fully expanded…
NASA CubeSat Will Shine a Laser Light on the Moon’s Darkest Craters
(Via NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory | JPL) To support the next wave of human exploration, the Lunar Flashlight mission will look for potential ice hidden at the Moon’s South Pole. As astronauts explore the Moon during the Artemis program, they may need to make use of the resources that already exist on the lunar surface….
Does America Need a Space Force?
No. No it does not. But that’s exactly what the Trump administration wants, and so today, August 9, 2018, America’s eerily stone-faced Vice President Mike Pence confirmed that there will indeed (pending Congress approval) be a new sixth branch of the U.S. military up and running by 2020, one dedicated to “restoring America’s leadership in…
Answers to 8 Questions About the August 2017 Solar Eclipse
It’s August and one of the most highly-anticipated astronomical events of the 21st century is nearly upon us: the August 21 solar eclipse, which will be visible as a total eclipse literally across the entire United States…but that doesn’t mean everywhere in the United States. Totality will pass across the U.S. in a narrow band about…
SpaceX Says It Will Fly Humans Past the Moon in 2018 (But It Still Must Meet NASA’s Needs)
On Monday, Feb. 27, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced plans for his company to send two privately-paying “space tourists” on a trip around the Moon in late 2018. According to Musk it’s a voyage that would send them, aboard SpaceX’s still-in-development Dragon 2 spacecraft, on a “long loop” past the Moon and out to about 400,000 miles…
Can Pluto Be a Planet Again Already?
Ever since the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 our Solar System was known to have nine planets orbiting the Sun. “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” was a popular mnemonic in my elementary school days to help remember the order of major planets from Mercury outward. But in 2006,…
Lights in the Dark 