More than 3,000 experiments have been conducted aboard the International Space Station during the 21 years humans have been living and working in space.
Read MoreMonth: January 2022
Hubble Sights a Sail of Stars
The spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 3318 are lazily draped across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This spiral galaxy lies in the constellation Vela and is roughly 115 light-years away from Earth.
Read MoreThis Week’s Sky at a Glance, January 21 – 29
As Jupiter gets lower now, Orion and Gemini rise high, the Winter Triangle pivots on Sirius, the Great Square sinks and the Big Dipper creeps up. The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, January 21 – 29 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Read MoreNASA’s gamma-ray observatory is in safe mode after a possible wheel failure
A visualization of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. (Image credit: NASA) NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has temporarily stopped its science observations while the mission team investigates an issue. On Tuesday night (Jan. 18), the observatory, a gamma-ray hunting space telescope originally called the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer, went into safe mode and paused all science work. This maneuver may have been in response to a reaction wheel failure, which the mission team continues to explore. Swift uses a total of six reaction wheels to autonomously point itself in the…
Read MoreThe Nearest Stars to Earth (Infographic)
The nearest stars, their distances in light-years, spectral types and known planets. (Image credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com contributor) Stars speckle the expanse of our ever-expanding universe. While our closest star is the sun that we orbit in our little corner of the cosmos, we can peer out to see what stellar neighbors live nearby. The nearest stars to Earth are three stars that lie about 4.37 light-years away in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system. The closest of these stars, Proxima Centauri, is just about 4.24 light-years away. (for reference, one…
Read MoreNASA to Discuss Webb’s Arrival at Final Destination, Next Steps
Scientists and engineers operating NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will answer questions about the mission’s latest milestones in a NASA Science Live broadcast at 3 p.m. EST Monday, Jan. 24, followed by a media teleconference at 4 p.m.
Read MoreBad weather delays SpaceX Dragon’s departure from space station to Saturday
A SpaceX resupply ship will have to wait at least one more day before returning to Earth. Yesterday (Jan. 19), cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov ventured outside the safe confines of the International Space Station to conduct a seven-hour, 11-minute spacewalk. While the pair cleaned up following the spacewalk, SpaceX was preparing its robotic Dragon cargo ship to come back to Earth. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. The Dragon craft, which had previously been scheduled to come home on Friday (Jan. 21), is now planning to undock from…
Read MoreA un año del mandato de Biden, la NASA mira hacia el futuro
Durante el año pasado, la NASA ha hecho valiosas contribuciones a los objetivos de la Administración Biden-Harris: liderando a nivel mundial, abordando el problema urgente del cambio climático, creando empleos bien remunerados e inspirando a las generaciones futuras.
Read MorePeering Through a Window to the World
In this image from Jan. 9, 2022, NASA astronaut Kayla Barron peered out from a window inside the International Space Station’s cupola.
Read MoreScientific Hardware, Experiments Return to Earth on SpaceX CRS-24 Dragon
A retired microscope and samples from studies on colloids and cellular signaling are among the cargo returning from the International Space Station aboard the 24th SpaceX commercial resupply services mission.
Read More