Month: January 2022

The giant rockets that will carry NASA astronauts to the moon a few years from now are really starting to come together.  In a brief status update posted on Tuesday (Jan. 11), NASA officials wrote that the agency and its manufacturing partners have made “great progress” on putting together the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for Artemis 2, a crewed moon-orbiting mission targeted to lift off in 2024. Testing and manufacturing of SLS parts is also underway for the moon-landing Artemis 3 mission, now slated for no earlier than 2025,…

Just weeks after the excitement of launch, the James Webb Space Telescope is already seeking focus in space. Engineers are beginning alignment procedures for the recently unfolded 18-segment massive golden mirror. The work will eventually get these individual reflectors working as a single focusing device, NASA officials wrote in a blog update posted on Wednesday (Jan. 12). The procedure began with engineers commanding 132 actuators that will move and position the primary mirror segments and the secondary mirror, just to make sure everything was responded as expected. The team also…

A huge asteroid will safely whiz by our planet next week. The asteroid, known as 7482 (1994 PC1), will make its closest approach to our planet on Jan. 18 at 4:51 p.m. EST (2151 GMT), according to a table from the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), managed by NASA at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The 3,400-foot (1 kilometer) asteroid will zoom by our planet at the equivalent of five lunar distances at its closest approach, the table indicates, at a top speed of nearly 12 miles…