Month: September 2022

On Sept. 9, 1982, the first private rocket launched from a Texas cattle ranch. The Conestoga 1 rocket was designed by Space Services Inc. of America and built from spare parts of other rockets. It was named after a type of covered wagon that used to transport American settlers westward to the new frontier during the 19th century. The private Conestoga 1 rocket sits atop its launchpad at Matagorda Island, Texas ahead of its historic Sept. 9, 1982 launch. It was the first privately developed rocket to fly.  (Image credit:…

At least one interstellar object (ISO) has likely crashed into Earth’s moon over the eons, a new paper suggests. The moon, which is filled with thousands of craters, is thus a good hunting ground for objects originating in interstellar space, the authors suggest through statistics and simulation.  “Given the number of ISOs that we expect to encounter in the solar system, there are probably a few craters that were formed by very high-speed ISOs throughout the solar system, and there are probably one or two on the moon,” lead author…

On Sept. 8, 2004, NASA’s Genesis spacecraft crash-landed in Utah after its parachutes failed to deploy.  Genesis was NASA’s first sample-return mission since the Apollo program and the first to bring back samples from anywhere farther than the moon. The spacecraft picked up solar wind particles while orbiting the L1 Lagrange point, which is about 1 million miles away from Earth. L1 is a “sweet spot” between the Earth and the sun, where the gravitational pull from both objects balances out.   Accidents do happen, as shown by NASA’s Genesis…

The orbit of an exoplanet around a star in a binary star system has been portrayed in three dimensions for the first time. The planet orbits its star at a different angle to the plane of the orbit of the two stars, and the misalignment could offer clues as to how planets form in binary systems. The exoplanet, GJ 896Ab (note the lower case b for the planet), was found in the binary system GJ 896AB (note the capital A and B for the two stars) that is located 20.3…

Bosons are particles that carry energy and forces throughout the universe.  The standard model of particle physics  —  the most robust theory we have of the sub-atomic world  —  divides every particle in the universe and even the larger composite particles fit into two broad categories; fermions and bosons.  Fermions such as quarks, electrons, neutrinos, protons, and neutrons are the foundation of matter, while one category of bosons, the gauge bosons, are responsible for acting as the ‘carriers’ of at least three of the four fundamental forces  —  electromagnetism, the…