SpaceX targeting April 20 for next Starship launch attempt

SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas — SpaceX is targeting Thursday (April 20) for the second attempt to launch its giant Starship vehicle to space. The 62-minute launch window opens Thursday at 9:28 a.m. EDT (1328 GMT), SpaceX wrote in an updated description (opens in new tab) of the highly anticipated test mission. The flight will be the first ever for a fully stacked Starship, the giant vehicle that SpaceX is developing to take people and cargo to the moon, Mars and beyond. The launch will occur from Starbase, SpaceX’s facility here…

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Giant exoplanet found, imaged directly thanks to star-mapping data (photos)

The newfound exoplanet HIP 99770 b (circled), is seen circling its host star in these images by Japan’s Subaru Telescope. Data from Europe’s star-mapping Gaia spacecraft revealed the likely presence of a big exoplanet in this system. (Image credit: T. Currie (Subaru/UTSA)) Astronomers have directly detected and imaged a gas giant orbiting another star by combining different techniques for hunting exoplanets. Researchers first looked at a catalog of star-mapping data combined from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia and older Hipparcos missions to identify stars that, based on their apparent…

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Dead NASA satellite will crash to Earth this week

A dead NASA spacecraft will come crashing back to Earth in the next few days, experts say. NASA’s RHESSI satellite, which studied the sun from 2002 until its decommissioning in 2018, is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere around 9:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday (April 19; 0130 GMT on April 20), plus or minus 16 hours, according to the latest estimates by the U.S. military. RHESSI (short for “Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager”) isn’t a huge satellite. It weighs just 600 pounds (270 kilograms), and the majority of that…

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