Two spacewalking astronauts began preparing the International Space Station (ISS) for new solar arrays on Sunday (Feb. 28), battling tough bolts to kick off a major power upgrade for the orbiting lab. Expedition 64 flight engineers Kate Rubins and Victor Glover — both NASA astronauts — spent more than seven hours working outside the station during the spacewalk to install modification kits for the new solar arrays. They worked on the station’s portside edge to install a bracket and support struts on two mast canisters at the base of the outpost’s current solar…
Read MoreMonth: February 2021
A SpaceX rocket will launch a Starlink satellite fleet tonight and you can watch it live. Here’s how.
[embedded content] Update for 8:40 p.m. ET: SpaceX aborted the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket carrying 60 Starlink satellites at the T-1 minute, 24 seconds mark. The next launch opportunity will be Monday, March 1, at 8:15 p.m. EST (0315 March 2 GMT). CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX will launch its next batch of Starlink satellites on Sunday (Feb. 28) as part of an effort to further expand the company’s satellite-internet fleet, and you can watch the action live online. The Hawthorne, California-based company is planning to fly one…
Read MoreHere’s what the Space.com Forum is discussing this week: Mars, memories, and more!
On a weekly basis, we’ll be sending you into the weekend with a selection of news and conversations that have the Space.com Forums buzzing! This week, the community was left in awe at all the images and sounds coming to us from NASA’s Perseverance rover. We also shared some of our favourite memories involving space. Finally, we look to the future of space exploration technology. Seeing (and hearing) red A portion of the panorama captured by the Mastcam-Z camera system aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. The full panorama consists…
Read MoreVice President Kamala Harris Calls NASA Astronaut Victor Glover
In celebration of Black History Month, NASA astronaut Victor Glover welcomed Vice President Kamala Harris to the International Space Station for a virtual chat.
Read More2021 Full Moon Calendar
The full moon shows its face to Earth about once a month. Well, sort of. Most of the time, the full moon isn’t perfectly full. We always see the same side of the moon, but part of it is in shadow. Only when the moon, Earth and the sun are perfectly aligned is the moon 100% full, and that alignment produces a lunar eclipse. And sometimes — once in a blue moon — the moon is full twice in a month (or four times in a season, depending on which…
Read MoreFebruary full moon 2021: See the ‘Snow Moon’ with Mars this weekend
The full moon of February, called the Snow Moon, will occur in the eastern U.S. during the wee hours of Saturday, Feb. 27, at 3:17 a.m. EST (0817 GMT). Early risers will see Mercury at its highest point in the predawn sky. In New York City moonrise is at 5:02 p.m. local time the evening of Feb. 26, and moonset is the next morning at 7:05 a.m., according to timeanddate.com. The sun sets the evening of Feb. 26 at 5:44 p.m. That means the almost-full moon will be in the…
Read MoreGiant crack frees a massive iceberg in Antarctica
A giant iceberg, more than 20 times the size of Manhattan, just split off from Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf. This dramatic breakup comes after a major crack formed on the shelf in November 2020 and continued to grow until the ‘berg finally broke off Friday morning (Feb. 26). The so-called “North Rift” crack is the third major chasm to actively tear across the Brunt Ice Shelf in the last decade, and so scientists with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) were absolutely expecting the split. “Our teams at BAS have been…
Read MoreHow did NASA’s Martian rover come to land in a crater named after a tiny Balkan village?
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Robert Greenberg, Dean of Arts, University of Auckland The world was excited by the news last week that NASA’s Perseverance rover had successfully landed in a Martian crater. The rover will now set about collecting samples from what scientists say was an ancient lake fed by a river. The name of this exotic Martian crater is Jezero. As a South Slavic linguist, I immediately recognised the word. In several former Yugoslav countries, including Bosnia and Herzegovina,…
Read MoreThe Perseverance rover may be on Mars, but there’s a lot we already know about from meteorites on Earth
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. James Scott, Associate Professor in Geology, University of Otago NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully touched down on Mars Feb. 18, and has already begun beaming back images. Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6XFebruary 18, 2021 See more But people might be surprised to learn there have been another 48 missions to the red planet so far. Of these, more than half failed at stages from take-off to deployment — including the 1999 Mars Climate…
Read MoreNASA Celebrates ‘Hidden Figure’ Mary W. Jackson With Building Naming Ceremony
On Friday, NASA celebrated the agency’s first African American female engineer, Mary W. Jackson, with a ceremony to formally name the agency’s headquarters building in Washington in her honor.
Read More