The sun has blasted Mercury with a plasma wave

A gigantic plasma wave that launched from the sun smashed into Mercury Tuesday (April 12), likely triggering a geomagnetic storm and scouring material from the planet’s surface. The powerful eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), was seen emanating from the sun‘s far side on the evening of April 11 and took less than a day to strike the closest planet to our star, where it may have created a temporary atmosphere and even added material to Mercury‘s comet-like tail, according to SpaceWeather.com. The plasma wave came from a…

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See the full Pink Moon rise tonight amid Easter, Passover and Ramadan

The full moon of April will rise tonight (April 16), amid Easter, Passover, Ramadan and spring celebrations around the world. In the United States, one traditional Native American name for this full moon is the Pink Moon, according to the Farmer’s Almanac and a NASA overview. Pink is meant to refer to the eastern United States herb moss pink, also called creeping phlox, moss phlox, or mountain phlox. April’s Full Pink Moon will reach its peak at 2:55 p.m. EDT (1855 GMT) and is also known in the United States by…

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China’s Shenzhou 13 capsule lands with crew of 3 after record-setting mission

China’s record-setting Shenzhou 13 mission is in the books. A Shenzhou spacecraft carrying three astronauts landed safely in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on Friday (April 15) just before 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT),  about 9 hours after departing from the core Tianhe module of the country’s new Tiangong space station. It was Saturday morning (April 16) local time at the landing site. The touchdown wrapped up the Shenzhou 13 mission, which spent a national-record six months in orbit, the vast majority of it aboard Tianhe. The longest previous…

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Private Ax-1 astronaut Eytan Stibbe to celebrate Passover in space

Eytan Stibbe, a private astronaut and the second Israeli to ever reach space, prepares to celebrate Passover in orbit. Last Friday (April 8), Stibbe was one of four crew members who launched on the first fully private crewed mission to the International Space Station. The mission, called Ax-1, sent the crew on a 10-day space mission which includes about eight days aboard the orbiting lab.  Ax-1 was organized by the Houston company Axiom Space and is commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, who now works for Axiom. The crew…

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