Month: August 2023

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that’s not yet visible from Earth. Perseverance photographs the sun daily with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured a big sunspot moving across the solar disk late last week and over the weekend, as SpaceWeather.com reported. “Because Mars is orbiting over the far side of the sun, Perseverance can see approaching sunspots more than a week before we do,” SpaceWeather.com wrote…

Satellites watched weakening tropical storm Hilary bring a deluge to California hours after a series of earthquakes shook a region north of Los Angeles. The “hurriquake,” as the coincidence of the two natural disasters has since been nicknamed, fortunately caused less damage than some initially predicted. Hilary, which had grown into a monstrous Category 4 hurricane late last week, lost most of its strength before making landfall over Mexico’s Baja California peninsula on Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile, the earthquake was a mild 5.1 magnitude event that caused no reported damage.  Hilary…

With two solar eclipses coming up in North America everyone’s focusing on getting the best view, but do you need the kind of magnification offered by the Celestron EclipSmart 12x50mm Porro solar binoculars? The scramble for solar eclipse safety glasses always mushrooms before every solar eclipse, but given that the sun and moon occupy barely half a degree in the 180-degrees sky, it’s tough to get anything other than a general view of how the eclipse is progressing. Cue 12x magnification on these solar eclipse binoculars, whose 50mm objective lenses…

Russia’s first moon lander in 47 years has crashed into the lunar surface, the country’s space agency reported on Sunday (Aug. 20).  The Luna-25 lander, which Russia had hoped would land at the south pole of the moon as early as Monday (Aug. 21), crashed into the moon after an orbital maneuver went wrong yesterday (Aug. 19), officials with Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said.  “At about 14:57 Moscow time [on Aug. 19], communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted,” Roscosmos wrote in an update on Telegram today (in Russian; translation…

Since it first landed in 2018, China’s Chang’e-4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon — has been taking stunning panoramas of impact craters and sampling minerals from the moon’s mantle. Now, the spacecraft has enabled scientists to visualize the layer cake of structures that comprise the upper 1,000 feet (300 meters) of the moon‘s surface in finer detail than ever before.  Their results, which were published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reveal billions of years of previously hidden lunar…

Russia’s first moon mission in nearly half a century may be in serious trouble. The Luna-25 spacecraft was supposed to maneuver itself into its final pre-landing orbit around the moon today (Aug. 19), ahead of a touchdown attempt on Monday (Aug. 21) or thereabouts. But the probe encountered a problem during the engine burn. “During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” Russia’s space agency Roscosmos wrote in an update on Telegram today…

Karol “Bo” Bobko, who was the only NASA astronaut to fly on the first launch of two space shuttle orbiters, has died at the age of 85. Bobko’s death on Thursday (Aug. 17) was confirmed by the Association of Space Explorers, a professional organization for the world’s astronauts and cosmonauts. A distinguished member, Bobko previously served as president of the U.S. chapter of the association. Bobko joined NASA in 1969 with the agency’s seventh group of astronauts. Unlike the classes that came before and after his selection, though, Bobko and…