Month: April 2022

NASA called off a critical fueling test of its Artemis 1 moon rocket on Sunday due to safety concerns with ground equipment on the booster’s mobile launcher platform.  Technicians planned to fuel the Artemis 1 megarocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), with 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of super-cold propellant on Sunday (April 3) at Pad 39B of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The fueling test was the final stage of a three-day “wet dress rehearsal” designed to test launch countdown process for NASA’s Artemis 1 mission to…

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Jovana Radulovic, Head of School of Mechanical and Design Engineering, University of Portsmouth The U.K. government is reportedly considering a £16 billion proposal to build a solar power station in space. Yes, you read that right. Space-based solar power is one of the technologies to feature in the government’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio. It has been identified as a potential solution, alongside others, to enable the U.K. to achieve net zero by 2050. But how would…

Rocket Lab just sent two more private Earth-observation satellites skyward. A Rocket Lab Electron launcher lifted off Saturday (April 2) at 8:41a.m. EST (1241 GMT) from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Pensula. The local time was 1:10 a.m. Sunday morning at the launch site. The two-stage Electron rocket carried two spacecraft for the Virginia company BlackSky. They were successfully deployed about 40 minutes after liftoff. “Payloads deployed another 100% mission success by the team,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck wrote on Twitter after the successful launch. Related:…

Growing up in the Bronx during the 1960s and ’70s, one of my mentors in astronomy was Dr. Kenneth L. Franklin, Chairman and chief scientist at New York’s Hayden Planetarium, who wrote about celestial events for the World Almanac and The New York Times.  Periodically Ken would make reference to our “dynamic and ever-changing sky.” Such an eloquent description would certainly fit the day-to-day changes among the planets in our early morning sky this month. Morning planets are front and center in April, with four out of the five brightest…

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. David Wallace, Assistant Clinical Professor of Electrical Engineering, Mississippi State University On Sept. 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. The operators of the telegraphs reported receiving electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the evenings, the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, could be seen as far south as Colombia. Typically, these lights are only visible at…

At precisely 12:44 p.m. EDT (1744 GMT) on Wednesday, March 30, residents in Bloomington, Indiana, and surrounding counties were literally shaken to attention by the sound of a loud explosion.  Locals quickly took to social media in search of answers, but found the source of the commotion a little more out of the ordinary than their usual small-town disturbance – a meteor had just exploded above their heads. What did they discover? The explosion turned out to be a wayward fireball. Related: Taurid meteor shower: Winter fireballs Post by Adrienne Evans…

Before launching the Apollo 11 mission to land the first astronauts on the moon, NASA secretly sent a fourth grader there first. That is just one of the storylines in director Richard Linklater’s new animated film, “Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood,” now streaming on Netflix. In the movie, Linklater transports viewers back to 1969, taking them on nostalgia-driven trip to not just see, but experience the lunar landing just as he did — coming of age while living in and around Houston, Texas. “It was just so exciting…