NASA astronauts buzz Artemis 1 SLS rocket in incredible jet flyby (photos)

Being an astronaut has never looked this fun. A group of NASA astronauts shared an incredible series of images showing them performing a flyby of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket while it sits waiting on the launch pad ahead of its scheduled Artemis 1 launch on Aug. 29.  The images, shared on Twitter by astronauts Andrew Morgan and Reid Wiseman and astronaut candidate Christina Birch, show four NASA T-38 trainer jets flying in formation recently above both the 322-foot-tall (98 meters) SLS megarocket at Launch Complex 39B and the…

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See the old moon and Venus conjunction tonight

About an hour and a half before sunset on Thursday (Aug. 25), Venus will shine close to the old moon in the early-evening sky.  The waning crescent moon will pass a mere 4°17′ to the north of the bright planet Venus. This close encounter, or conjunction, occurs at 4:58 p.m. EDT (20:58 GMT), when the two objects share the same right ascension or the same ecliptic longitude, according to In-the-Sky.org (opens in new tab). The moon is currently shining at a magnitude of -8.4, while Venus shines with a magnitude…

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Marvel at the James Webb Space Telescope’s largest image of the cosmos yet

The wonders of deep space have never looked this good. A team of scientists working with data from the have released a colossal mosaic of images from the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. The image from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) (opens in new tab) collaboration is a mosaic formed from 690 individual frames taken with JWST’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam).  The Epoch 1 image, as it is known, shows distant galaxies whose light has shifted from visible to infrared light during its journey through time and…

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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to launch next space mission on Aug. 31

Blue Origin plans to launch its next mission to suborbital space next week, but it won’t be a crewed affair. Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company announced on Wednesday (Aug. 24) that it’s targeting Aug. 31 for NS-23, the next flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. New Shepard is best known for taking space tourists on brief trips to the final frontier, but NS-23 won’t haul anyone aloft — just 36 payloads provided by universities, other institutions and students. NS-23 is scheduled to launch at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) on Aug.…

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Little private moon rover will try to survive the long, cold lunar night

NASA has funded technology that aims to keep a moon rover alive through the long, frigid lunar night. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic is developing lunar communication and survival tech, which will be tested on a mission that sends the company’s little CubeRover to the moon. CubeRover is designed to last at least 28 days on Earth’s nearest neighbor, including surviving the 14-day-long lunar night. Astrobotic just received a $1.8 million subcontract focusing on “lunar night thermal systems” from Advanced Cooling Technologies, flowing from NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.  The news…

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