Here’s what to expect from 5 stages of the total solar eclipse 2026

NeRD

We’re just a few short days away from the Aug. 12 total solar eclipse, when millions will watch as the moon glides across the face of the sun, hiding its light in a wondrous display of orbital mechanics. The eclipse will unfold during August’s new moon phase, as the lunar disk slips silently between the sun and Earth in the daytime sky. Ordinarily, the subtle tilt in the moon’s orbit causes its shadow to pass just below, or above our planet, missing it entirely. However, on Aug. 12, the moon’s…

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SpaceX launches 24 Starlink satellites to orbit from California (video)

NeRD

SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit today (Aug. 8) from California’s scenic central coast. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today at 12:35 p.m. EDT (1635 GMT; 9:35 a.m. local time), carrying 24 of the internet-beaming spacecraft to low Earth orbit (LEO). The rocket’s first stage returned to Earth as planned about 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean atop the SpaceX droneship “Of Course I Still Love You.” It was the 16th flight for this particular booster, which…

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‘Transformers: The Movie’ at 40: the cartoon spin-off that traumatized a generation of kids

NeRD

Fans who’d grown up on the original “Star Wars” trilogy were adults when they went through the ordeal of Han, Luke and Leia dying on screen. If tears were shed then, however, spare a thought for the kids who’d queued to watch “Transformers: The Movie” back in 1986, only to see many of their heroes expiring in the cartoon spin-off’s opening act. If you can have a bloodbath of sentient machines, this was it, as robots in disguise met their maker at an alarming rate. Ironhide? Dead. Ratchet? No more.…

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APOD: 2026 August 8 – A Messier Moment for Tempel 2

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APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 8 – A… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. A Messier Moment for Tempel 2 Explanation: Which of these is not a comet? You guessed it – the one on the right is a globular star cluster. The diffuse greenish coma of periodic comet 10P/Tempel 2…

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SpaceX serious about building factories on the moon: ‘It’s going to happen,’ Elon Musk says

NeRD

As usual, SpaceX is dreaming big. The company plans to build factories on the moon, using robots to do much of the heavy lifting, Elon Musk said on Tuesday (Aug. 4) during SpaceX‘s first-ever quarterly earnings call. “We are going to land a lot of tonnage on the moon,” he said. “We’re going to build the factories on the moon. The robots will be helpful with that.” This is not a newly revealed vision; Musk first laid it out in February, in a blog post that announced SpaceX’s purchase of…

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‘Not looking good right now’: Starship likely to be lost at sea 2 weeks after epic 13th test flight, Elon Musk says

NeRD

It looks like Starship’s two-week-long ocean adventure won’t have a happy ending. The SpaceX megarocket conducted its 13th test flight on July 24, lifting off from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas. Things went pretty well on Flight 13, especially for Starship‘s 171-foot-tall (52 meters) upper stage, known as Ship, which splashed down as planned in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia. In an unexpected first, Ship survived that homecoming, staying in one piece even after toppling over and hitting the waves. It remains intact still,…

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NASA figured out how to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year

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NASA just made an interstellar tweak to the Voyager 2 spacecraft, known as the “Big Bang”, to keep its remaining 50-year-old science instruments running a little longer. Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977, called Voyager 1, rely on a form of nuclear battery known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that uses the heat produced by the decay of plutonium. But the supply of plutonium on each probe drops at about four watts a year on each spacecraft. To keep the probe running on this dwindling power supply, engineers…

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2026 IGARSS Hyperwall Schedule

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Explore This Section Earth Earth Observer Editor’s Corner Feature Articles Meeting Summaries News Science in the News In Memoriam Announcements Archives IGARSS 2026 Join NASA in the Exhibit Hall (Booth #100) for Hyperwall Storytelling by NASA experts. Full Hyperwall Agenda below. MONDAY, AUGUST 10 3:00 PM  Technology Enabling the Future of Earth Science Mike Seablom 3:15 PM  Discovery Earth: New Missions & Technical Innovation Advancing Earth System Insights Karen St. Germain TUESDAY, AUGUST 11 10:00 AM STELLA: Open-Source Multisenor Platforms For Real-Time Environmental Monitoring Mike Taylor 10:15 AM NOAA Geostationary…

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NASA’s IXPE Studies Magnetar

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NASA/Pablo Garcia Scientists using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) conducted more than 140 hours of observations of the magnetar 1E 1547-5408, shown in this Aug. 5, 2026, artist’s concept, between March and April 2025. In doing so, they may have captured empty space behaving in a way physicists have predicted for 90 years, but never directly observed. Magnetars are a special class of neutron stars with ultra-strong magnetic fields, the strongest of any object in the observable universe, around a trillion times stronger than the strongest permanent magnets ever…

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