Deadly wildfires in Hawaii seen from International Space Station (photo)

Satellite imagery captured by the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday (Aug. 12) shows the Hawaiian island of Maui four days after wildfires broke out on the land. The photo was taken as the spaceborne laboratory orbited some 259 miles (417 km) above the Pacific Ocean.  As of Wednesday (Aug. 16), the death toll of Hawaii’s catastrophic fires rose above 100. Shortly after confirmation of this figure, Governor Josh Green addressed the public saying “We are heartsick that we’ve had such loss.”  And not only is this devastation being deeply…

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These 3 teams just hacked a US Air Force satellite in space … and won big cash prizes

The U.S. Air Force has announced the winners of its first-of-its-kind satellite hacking contest. This year’s Hack-A-Sat competition tasked teams with hacking into an actual satellite on orbit. This was the first year that the competition tasked teams with hacking an actual live satellite zooming above Earth; previous years used simulated satellites on the ground.  The small cubesat, known as Moonlighter, was developed by the Aerospace Corporation and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and launched on June 5, 2023 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with a cargo…

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NASA’s New Horizons will investigate Uranus from the rear (Neptune, too). Here’s how you can help

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which visited Pluto in 2015, is embarking on an observing campaign of the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune – and scientists need your help. Although New Horizons is now far beyond both Uranus and Neptune, throughout September it will be turning its Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) back to look at both planets from a vantage point more than 5 billion miles from Earth. In doing so, it will be seeing these worlds from the opposite direction to how we see them from Earth. To…

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