Space news for NeRDs
The crewmen of the third and final manned Skylab mission relax on the USS New Orleans, prime recovery ship for their mission, about an hour after their Command Module splashed down at 10:17 a.m. (CDT), Feb. 8, 1974. The splashdown, which occurred 176 statute miles from San Diego, ended 84 record-setting days of flight activity aboard the Skylab space station cluster in Earth orbit.
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5 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Deep Space Station 13 at NASA’s Goldstone complex in California – part of the agency’s Deep Space Network – is an experimental antenna that has been retrofitted with an optical terminal. In a first, this proof of concept received both radio frequency and laser signals from deep space at the same time. NASA/JPL-Caltech Capable of receiving both radio frequency and optical signals, the DSN’s hybrid antenna has tracked and decoded the downlink laser from DSOC, aboard NASA’s Psyche mission.…
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Read MoreThe long lost art of whispering will certainly be resurrected by panicked survivors in the crazy apocalyptic world of “A Quiet Place: Day One” as this newly-released trailer demonstrates. Paramount’s harrowing preview just crept up on us for the official prequel to 2018’s hit sci-fi thriller, “A Quiet Place,” where audiences followed the Abbott family as they battled against blind alien invaders with hyper-sonic hearing abilities which enabled them to hunt prey by listening for loud lifeforms. This startling origin story hails from filmmaker John Krasinksi, who directed the original…
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NASA/CXC/M.Weiss This artist’s illustration depicts the findings of a new study about the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A* (abbreviated as Sgr A*). As reported in our latest press release, this result found that Sgr A* is spinning so quickly that it is warping spacetime — that is, time and the three dimensions of space — so that it can look more like a football. These results were made with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). A team of researchers applied a new…
Read MoreThe rocks making up the Geminid meteor shower that occurs towards the end of every year may have been born through a chaotic event 18,000 years ago, a new study suggests — potentially making the meteoroids about 10 times older than previously estimated. The Geminid shower is named after the constellation Gemini — the position in the sky from which the meteors seem to appear. But the meteors actually originate from 3200 Phaethon, a bizarre blue asteroid that swings along a watermelon-shaped orbit to come within just 0.14 astronomical units…
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3 min read NASA’s Hubble Traces ‘String of Pearls’ Star Clusters in Galaxy Collisions Galaxy AM 1054-325 has been distorted into an S-shape from a normal pancake-like spiral shape by the gravitational pull of a neighboring galaxy, seen in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. A consequence of this is that newborn clusters of stars form along a stretched-out tidal tail for thousands of light-years, resembling a string of pearls. They form when knots of gas gravitationally collapse to create about 1 million newborn stars per cluster. NASA, ESA, STScI,…
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2 Min Read First Look: Spaceplane Stacked and Shaken at NASA Test Facility Nose-up and bathed in soft blue lights, Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane and its Shooting Star cargo module cast dramatic shadows onto the walls of NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, as members of the media got their first glimpse of the towering 55-foot-tall stack on Feb. 1. The spaceplane and its cargo module are undergoing testing at the facility to prepare for the extreme environment of space. To view this video please enable JavaScript,…
Read MoreAstronaut Bruce McCandless II approaches his maximum distance from the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Challenger in this 70mm frame photographed by his fellow crewmembers onboard the reusable vehicle. McCandless is in the midst of the first “field” tryout of the nitrogen-propelled, hand-controlled back-pack device called the manned maneuvering unit (MMU). Astronaut Robert L. Stewart got a chance to test the same unit a while later in the lengthy EVA session while the two spacewalkers were photographed and monitored by their fellow crewmembers in Challenger’s cabin. Those inside were Astronauts Vance D.…
Read MoreMONTREAL, CANADA — My moonwalk was missing the most important thing. I, untrained as a spacewalking astronaut, felt literally lost in space as I fumbled around NASA‘s Gateway station circling the moon. I could see the Earth. Canadarm3 was doing its robotic arm thing right in front of me. I could even peek inside the empty crew modules. Then I finally looked down. There it was. Craters. Lumpy shadows. Goosebumps. The moon in the closeness I had wanted to see since I was a child. Though simulated, the sensation of…
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