Month: May 2022

We may have heard the last from China’s Zhurong for a while, after the solar-powered Mars rover entered a dormant state due to winter’s cold and local sand and dust storms. Zhurong entered hibernation on May 18, with temperatures of around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius) during the local Mars day and minus 148 F (minus 100 C) during the night, according to a statement from the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program. China’s Tianwen 1 orbiter, which delivered Zhurong to Mars last May, also detected sand and dust…

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From blazing a trail through the night sky to wiping out the dinosaurs, we’ve all heard of the chunks of rock or ice traversing our solar system. But what’s the difference between comets and asteroids?  In our solar system‘s asteroid belt there are millions of asteroids and at least 1.1 million large asteroids with a diameter of 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) or greater. However, asteroids are just one of many objects orbiting the sun.  The rocky objects that are too small to be planets and are categorized either as comets,…

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New for 2022, the tau Herculid meteor shower may make an appearance on the night of May 30-31.  Sometimes, astronomy can be full of surprises. Take the case of a tiny comet, normally far too faint to be seen without the help of a telescope. But in 1995, it suddenly and quite unexpectedly brightened up to become dimly visible with the naked eye.  Come the end of May, things could turn exciting, thanks again to this same tiny comet. On that night, a new meteor shower — the tau Herculids…

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When SpaceX launched a new Starlink fleet into orbit last week, the rocket wasn’t the only star.  As SpaceX prepared its ground-based tracking cameras for the early-morning Falcon 9 rocket launch from Florida on May 18, its operators snagged a spectacular view of the nearly full moon. Minutes later, the Falcon 9 launched 53 Starlink satellites to space from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.  “What you’re looking at on your screen is this incredible live shot of the being beincg captured by one of our…

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Netflix’s mind-expanding animated anthology, “Love, Death + Robots,” has just dropped the trippy trailer for Season 3 and it’s a far-out smorgasbord of sci-fi shorts centered around monstrous crustaceans, astronauts on acid, ravenous zombies, a cyborg bear, insectoid extraterrestrials, elder gods, silly robots, seductive sirens, and super-smart rats, all guaranteed to deliver recurring nightmares. David Fincher (“Se7en,” “Alien 3,” “Zodiac”) has been executive producing this intriguing series since it first debuted on Netflix back in March 2019, and this upcoming season of “Love, Death + Robots” will see him stepping…

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Boeing’s Starliner OFT-2 spacecraft approaches the International Space Station in this stunning photo by European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. (Image credit: Samantha Cristoforetti/European Space Agency) It’s not every day a brand new spaceship arrives at the International Space Station. So when a Boeing Starliner space capsule made its historic first docking at the orbiting lab this weekend, you can bet astronauts were watching. Boeing’s first uncrewed Starliner spacecraft to visit the station docked Friday night (May 20) and new photos from the orbiting lab’s crew captured the moment in…

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On May 21, 2010, Japan launched the first successful solar sail Ikaros into space.  Solar sail technology uses light for spacecraft propulsion, but not in the same way that traditional solar panels do. While solar panels use light to generate electricity, spacecraft with solar sails rely only on the light itself to cruise through outer space. Particles of light called photons actually push the spacecraft forward. A single photon can’t accomplish this on its own, but with enough photons striking a spacecraft, propulsion is possible—you just need a big surface…

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