Day: February 5, 2025

‘This idea that it takes like 250 years for Pluto to orbit the sun, I think that’s just bizarre.’ Star Trek scion Adam Nimoy talks our favorite (dwarf) planet for ‘I Heart Pluto’ festival

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The 95th anniversary of Pluto’s official discovery by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona is rapidly approaching and the historic location is gearing up to host a grand celebration on Feb. 13-17, 2025 with a five-day series of educational and social activities to mark the occasion. Lowell’s sixth annual “I Heart Pluto Festival” will honor the remote icy world that was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 and originally found at that location on Feb. 18, 1930. This year is also the tenth anniversary of NASA’s…

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NASA Invites Media to Learn about Spacecraft Autonomous Tech Firsts

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NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley invites media to learn more about Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy (DSA), a technology that allows individual spacecraft to make independent decisions while collaborating with each other to achieve common goals – without human input. The DSA team achieved multiple firsts during tests of such swarm technology as part of the agency’s project.  DSA develops software tools critical for future autonomous, distributed, and intelligent spacecraft that will need to interact with each other to achieve complex mission objectives. Testing onboard the agency’s Starling mission resulted…

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New ‘Star Wars: The Mask of Fear’ novel stars Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera (interview)

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Galavanting through the galaxy far, far away with seemingly effortless literary ease, prolific “Star Wars” author, Alexander Freed has been catapulted to the top tier of sci-fi writers. He is confidently able to navigate far off alien worlds and complex plotlines via their imposing storytelling skills, engaging characters, and vivid descriptions. Freed accumulated an impressive resume of video game work during his many years at Bioware and EA Dice/Electronic Arts, then later used that valuable experience to pen “Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company,” the “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”…

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Giant planet or ‘failed star?’ Newfound mystery world blurs the lines

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One of the largest exoplanets to be found orbiting a relatively low-mass star has been discovered, thanks to the way the planet’s gravity drags its star around on its journey through space. The planet is the fourth world to be spotted in data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which was designed to map a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, cataloguing their masses, luminosities, temperatures and motions through space. It’s this latter property that led to the discovery of the giant exoplanet Gaia-4b. It orbits a star…

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Wind Over Its Wing: NASA’s X-66 Model Tests Airflow

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2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project concluded wind tunnel testing in the fall of 2024. Tests on a Boeing-built X-66 model were completed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley in its 11-Foot Transonic Unitary Plan Facility. The model underwent tests representing expected flight conditions to obtain engineering information to influence design of the wing and provide data for flight simulators. NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator (SFD) project recently concluded wind tunnel tests of its X-66…

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Apollo 14 Moon Landing

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An excellent view of the Apollo 14 lunar module on the Moon, as photographed during the first Apollo 14 moonwalk on the lunar surface. The astronauts have already deployed the U.S. flag. While astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr., commander, and Edgar D. Mitchell, lunar module pilot, descended in the lunar module to explore the Moon, astronaut Stuart A. Roosa, command module pilot, remained with the command and service modules in lunar orbit.

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NASA Goes Live: First Twitch Stream from Space Station

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NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA) For the first time, NASA is hosting a live Twitch event from about 250 miles off the Earth aboard the International Space Station, bringing new audiences closer to space than ever before. Viewers will have the opportunity to hear from NASA astronauts live and ask questions about life in orbit. The event will begin at 11:45 a.m. EST on Wednesday, Feb. 12, livestreamed on the agency’s official Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/nasa “This Twitch event from space is the first of…

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