NASA names Perseverance rover’s Mars touchdown site ‘Octavia E. Butler Landing’

The Perseverance rover‘s Red Planet touchdown site has been renamed for Octavia E. Butler, the noted African American science fiction author. NASA announced they would informally redesignate the Mars rover’s landing site inside Jezero Crater on Friday (March 5), during the same press conference where the agency revealed Perseverance made its first drive on Mars.  Butler was the first African American woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards that honor great science fiction, and the first science fiction writer overall who received a MacArthur Fellowship. Her notable work…

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First-ever ‘space hurricane’ detected over the North Pole

For the first time, astronomers have detected a powerful, 600-mile-wide (1,000 kilometers) hurricane of plasma in Earth‘s upper atmosphere — a phenomenon they’re calling a “space hurricane.” The space hurricane raged for nearly 8 hours on Aug. 20, 2014, swirling hundreds of miles above Earth’s magnetic North Pole, according to a study published Feb. 22 in the journal Nature Communications. Made from a tangled mess of magnetic field lines and fast-flying solar wind, the hurricane was invisible to the naked eye — however, four weather satellites that passed over the…

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NASA’s Perseverance rover takes its first test drive on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance rover has taken its first test drive on Mars, the agency announced Friday (March 5).  Perseverance, a car-sized rover that landed successfully on the Red Planet Feb. 18, just made its first short drive on Thursday, NASA officials said. The rover moved a total of 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) across the Martian terrain on a drive that took about 33 minutes, during which Perseverance moved forward, turned in place and backed up. The rover drives with a top speed of .01 miles per hour (.016 kilometers).  “Our first…

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Mercury meets up with Jupiter (Saturn and the moon, too!) in the morning sky this week

See Mercury with Jupiter and Saturn this Saturday (March 6) in the early morning sky.  (Image credit: SkySafari app) If you’re of a certain age, you might remember a comic strip called “Mutt and Jeff.” Mutt was a tall guy while in contrast, Jeff was quite short. Ever since they were created back in 1907, any pair of individuals of different sizes came to be known as a “Mutt and Jeff”. You might then say that in our morning sky this week, we’re going to have a celestial version of…

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Watch live tonight: Join Slooh’s live webcast of asteroid Apophis flyby

[embedded content] Video courtesy of Slooh. Visit Slooh.com to snap and share your own photos from this live event, and interact with our hosts and guests, and personally control Slooh’s telescopes. The Slooh online observatory will broadcast live views of the near-Earth asteroid Apophis as it makes a close but safe flyby of our planet today (March 5) at 8 p.m. EST (0100 GMT on Saturday). Slooh’s webcast will feature images of Apophis from Slooh’s remotely operated observatories in Chile and the Canary Islands.  “We’ll be tracking Apophis most of…

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