During a total eclipse event on July 2, 2019 the shadow of the Moon passed across the southern Pacific Ocean and parts of Chile and Argentina. For viewers on Earth the event briefly turned the daytime sky to night as the Moon completely blocked the Sun, but for one spacecraft orbiting far beyond the Moon…
Tag: science
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.
Proposed Trident Mission Could Explore Neptune’s Moon Triton in 2038
(News from NASA) Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft ever to have flown past Neptune, and it left a lot of unanswered questions. The views were as stunning as they were puzzling, revealing massive, dark plumes of icy material spraying out from Triton‘s surface. But how? Images showed that the icy landscape was young and…
ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter Detects Green Airglow Around Mars
Many photographs taken from low-Earth orbit, especially from the Space Station while on the night side of Earth, show a thin line of green or yellowish light just above the limb of our planet. This is called airglow, and it’s caused by excited oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere releasing energy in the form of…
Solar Orbiter is Now Capturing the Closest-Ever Pictures of the Sun
(News from ESA) On June 15, 2020, the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft made its first close approach to the Sun (perihelion), coming within 77 million kilometers (48 million miles) of its surface—about half the distance between the Sun and Earth. Over the next week mission scientists will test the spacecraft’s ten science instruments, including the six…
New Horizons is Far Enough from Earth to See an “Alien Sky”
(News from JHUAPL) For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we see from Earth. More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA’s New Horizons has traveled so far that it…
June 3, 1965: NASA’s First Spacewalk
Today marks the the anniversary of America’s first spacewalk, performed by NASA astronaut Edward H. White II on the afternoon of June 3, 1965 during the four-day Gemini IV mission. In NASA terminology spacewalks are also referred to as extravehicular activities, or “EVAs” – basically anything performed by a person in space outside a spacecraft. The…
Mars May Have Repeatedly Been a Ringed Planet
(News from SETI) Scientists from the SETI Institute and Purdue University have found that the only way to produce Deimos’s unusually tilted orbit is for Mars to have had a ring billions of years ago. While some of the more massive planets in our solar system have giant rings and numerous big moons, Mars only…
Haunting Images from NASA of a Space Suit Drifting in Orbit
You might want to file this under “nightmare fuel.” Yes this is a thing that actually happened on the International Space Station in 2006. But if you’re not already familiar with what’s going on here, it’s probably not what you think…
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…
NASA Releases Thousands of Hours of Apollo 11 Tapes
You’ve undoubtedly heard many times over the historic words uttered by Neil Armstrong when the Apollo 11 LM Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969 and when he stepped off the ladder onto the Moon’s dusty, desolate surface later that same day, but the success of the Apollo 11 mission…
Meet Metis – Jupiter’s Closest, Quickest Moon
Everyone’s heard of Jupiter’s four most famous moons Europa, Io, Callisto, and Ganymede—we’ve known about them for over 400 years, thanks to Galileo—but giant Jupiter has many more moons than that. To date there are thought to be 79 natural satellites orbiting Jupiter. So you’d be forgiven for not being immediately familiar with all of…
Lights in the Dark 