Month: October 2021

Crew-3 astronauts arrive in Florida ahead of SpaceX’s planned Halloween launch

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Four astronauts were all smiles as they arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 26) ahead of SpaceX’s third operational astronaut launch for NASA.  NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn, and Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency (ESA), stepped off a NASA plane at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT) after it parked on the former space shuttle runway here at KSC. Their mission, called Crew-3, will see a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch a Crew Dragon…

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A new sunspot is firing off solar eruptions and here’s what it looks like on video

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Our otherwise quiet sun had a stormy five-hour fiesta during the early hours of Tuesday (Oct. 26). NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded a series of eruptions on the limb of the sun, not facing the Earth. It’s unclear from the angle of the explosions (relative to Earth) from where they emanated, but the space weather tracking site SpaceWeather.com suggested it would be a sunspot, or a dark concentration of magnetic activity on the sun’s surface. “At least half a dozen explosions occurred during that brief movie,” SpaceWeather.com wrote in…

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Lunar eclipse 2021: What are they & when is the next one?

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Lunar eclipses occur when Earth’s shadow blocks the sun’s light, which otherwise reflects off the moon. There are three types — total, partial and penumbral — with the most dramatic being a total lunar eclipse, in which Earth’s shadow completely covers the moon. The next lunar eclipse will be a partial lunar eclipse on Nov. 19. The event will be visible from North and South America, Australia, and parts of Europe and Asia. The eclipse will peak at 4:02 a.m. EST (0902 GMT). The entire event will last about six…

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Japanese H-2A rocket launches advanced new GPS satellite into orbit

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Japan’s H-2A rocket launched a new navigation satellite into orbit on Monday (Oct. 25). The rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 10:19 p.m. EDT Monday (0219 GMT, or 11:19 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Oct. 26), according to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which builds and operates H-2A rockets the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). “It was really beautiful launch,” the company tweeted after a successful liftoff.  The satellite, QZS-1R, is a replacement for the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System 1 satellite first launched in 2010. The official QZSS…

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SpaceX is ‘go’ to launch astronauts to space station on Halloween

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SpaceX is “go” to launch its spooky space station mission this weekend — as long as a toilet issue gets cleared up in time. No showstoppers were found during a flight readiness review (FRR) for the company’s Crew-3 mission, which will send four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Crew-3 therefore remains on track to lift off early on Halloween morning (Oct. 31), NASA and SpaceX announced Monday (Oct. 25). “We had a good review today,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager, said…

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