Day: January 4, 2025

This Week In Space podcast: Episode 142 —2025 in Space

NeRD

2025 in Space – The Year’s Most Anticipated Space Missions & Developments – YouTube Watch On On Episode 142 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik talk about 2025 in space! It’s going to be an exciting year, kicking off with the first launch attempt for Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy booster and another test flight of Starship. Then we’ll see a new asteroid sampling mission from China, the first test flight of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander to the moon, and the launch of the first-ever…

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‘Silo’ Season 2, ‘The Book of Quinn’: Juliette suffers, Walker snitches, and Lukas decodes Quinn’s letter

NeRD

You can feel it in the air, not just the advent of the fresh new year, but the narrative momentum building towards a turbulent climax in Apple TV+’s “Silo” Season 2 as we entered this eighth episode Friday night titled, “The Book of Quinn.” Last week’s chapter called “The Dive” found Juliette resurfacing from successfully starting the ground water pump to find Solo missing and a trail of blood and hatchet providing ominous clues to his disappearance. Lukas Kyle is inching closer to decoding Salvador Quinn’s secret letter, while Bernard…

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Peter Parker battles a rogue alien hunter in Marvel’s ‘Predator vs. Spider-Man’

NeRD

Since Disney acquired 20th Century Fox and its vault of valuable intellectual property back in 2019, the House of Mouse has been slowly tapping into its fresh stable of Fox film franchises to create mashups and crossovers with its more popular Marvel Comics characters and so far the results are electrifying. That dreadlocked interstellar hunter known as the Predator has already infiltrated two Marvel miniseries courtesy of veteran writer Benjamin Percy, with 2023’s “Predator vs. Wolverine” and 2024’s “Predator vs. Black Panther.” Now Percy is back to pounce on a…

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NASA will announce update to Mars sample return plans on Jan. 7. Here’s how to listen in

NeRD

The year 2025 isn’t even a week old and NASA is already gearing up for its first big announcement, this one about the agency’s ambitious, yet beleaguered, Mars sample return mission. On Tuesday (Jan. 7), NASA’s top brass will hold an audio-only press conference to update the public on its Mars sample return program. The media briefing will begin at 1:00 p.m. EST (1800 GMT), and you’ll be able to listen in online via NASA’s website. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Nicky Fox, the agency’s associate administrator for science missions,…

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Small satellite constellation could reveal black holes like never before

NeRD

Researchers in South Korea are developing a constellation of satellites that could reveal what goes on in the vicinity of supermassive black holes like never before. The constellation, dubbed Capella, is a brainchild of Seoul National University astronomy professor Sascha Trippe. An expert in black holes, Trippe has grown frustrated with the limitations of humanity’s existing instruments for observing black holes and concerned that unless major technological advances are made, research may soon reach a “dead end.” When the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole — the one at…

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What I learned from a black hole in Los Angeles

NeRD

On York Boulevard in Los Angeles, a blurred black hole hangs on a dark wall, joined only by a pair of headphones playing looping echoes of its siblings colliding. It’s a familiar scene of our galaxy’s supermassive central void, and certainly one that has flown far and wide over the years. I’d bet you’ve seen it. Journalists (including myself) have fawned over this image, affixing it to exhilarating news stories under titles like “First Image of Milky Way’s Black Hole” or “Center of Our Galaxy Revealed.” Universities have thrown it…

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