Category: Solar System

Our solar system

Private Blue Ghost moon lander sees gorgeous lunar eclipse from Earth orbit (video)

NeRD

Blue Ghost, the “little lander” from Firefly Aerospace that’s headed to the moon, has captured the littlest lunar eclipse ever (as well as our hearts). Firefly contracted SpaceX to launch the company’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky” mission last month (Jan. 15) on a Falcon 9 rocket, out of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since then, the lander has been camped out in Earth orbit, undergoing systems checks and preparing to light its engines for a translunar injection burn, which will propel the probe on a four-day trajectory for…

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft watches most powerful volcanic event ever seen on Jupiter’s moon Io

NeRD

Even for Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanic body in the solar system, a recent volcanic event witnessed by NASA’s Juno spacecraft takes the biscuit. The event was just one eruption centralized in a newly found hotspot region of Io estimated to be larger than Lake Superior on Earth. The currently unnamed region is so powerful that the energy it belts out is equivalent to six times the energy produced by all of Earth’s power plants combined. The team behind these findings used data collected by Juno, which made flybys…

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NASA’s new SPHEREx space telescope to launch in February — it can do what the JWST can’t

NeRD

In late February, if all goes to plan, a new character will enter NASA’s space telescope epic. It’s an eggshell white, conical probe named SPHEREx, which (get ready for a mouthful) stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. And, because it works with infrared light, SPHEREx is meant to reveal things even the trailblazing James Webb Space Telescope cannot. “Taking a snapshot with JWST is like taking a picture of a person,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA…

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Mars was hot then cold then hot again. Could life have really survived there?

NeRD

New research suggests that temperatures on ancient Mars may have fluctuated between hot and cold periods through a relatively short period during its lifetime of billions of years. But these hot and cold spells may have been detrimental to life if it existed on the Red Planet. Mars may be a dry and arid planet today, but scientists know that Earth’s neighbor was much wetter and much more like our planet in its ancient past. These new findings from a team of researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School…

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NASA astronaut Suni Williams sets new record on 5.5-hour spacewalk outside ISS (video)

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Two NASA astronauts working outside of the International Space Station on Thursday (Jan. 30) were able to finally remove a faulty radio communications unit, succeeding where two previous spacewalks had been unsuccessful. The extended work needed to free the radio frequency group (RFG) by Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore came at a cost, though, as the two ran out of time to accomplish all of the tasks planned for Thursday’s EVA (extravehicular activity). Williams and Wilmore, who launched together on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft and are serving together on…

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Astronomers find hundreds of ‘hidden’ black holes — and there may be billions or even trillions more

NeRD

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of hidden supermassive black holes lurking in the universe — and there may be billions or even trillions more out there that we still haven’t found. The researchers identified these giant black holes by peering through clouds of dust and gas in infrared light. The finds could help astronomers refine their theories of how galaxies evolve, the researchers say. Hunting for black holes is difficult work. They are the darkest objects in the universe, as not even light can escape their gravitational pull. Scientists can sometimes…

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SpaceX Starlink satellite sparks brilliant fireball as it falls from space over US (videos)

NeRD

A SpaceX Starlink internet satellite fell from space in a blaze of glory overnight, lighting up the Midwest U.S. sky with a brilliant fireball. Stargazers across parts of Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois witnessed the Starlink satellite’s fiery demise as it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere late Tuesday (Jan. 28) and were quick to share videos of the sight. “WOAH. Something big just broke apart over Northern Illinois. What a sight!” a skywatcher with the username boinksi wrote on the social media site X. A video with the post shows a…

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NASA X-ray telescope Chandra discovers black holes ‘blow’ on their food to cool it down

NeRD

Anyone who has experienced the blistering pain associated with biting into a fresh apple pastry or taking a swig of hot coffee can attest to the importance of blowing on your food or drink before introducing it to your mouth. It turns out that black holes may perform the cosmic equivalent of this routine, “blowing” on blistering hot matter before they gobble it down. This supermassive black hole-food cooling process was discovered by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe some of the…

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Watch a SpaceX rocket launch the next-gen SpainSat NG 1 satellite into orbit tonight

NeRD

SpaceX is set to launch a next-generation Spanish communications satellite tonight (Jan. 29) and you can watch it live online. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying SpainSat Next Generation 1 (SpainSat NG 1), a communications satellite for the European Space Agency (ESA) and Hisdesat communications, is scheduled to lift off from Pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a two-hour window that opens at 8:34 p.m. EST (0134 GMT on Jan. 30). SpaceX will webcast the launch live beginning about 15 minutes prior to liftoff, which you can…

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Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander snaps its 1st photos of the moon (images)

NeRD

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost moon lander has snapped its first photos of its distant target. On Monday (Jan. 27), Texas-based Firefly released two photos of the moon that Blue Ghost captured from Earth orbit. One shows the natural satellite all alone, a small grayish dot in an empty black sea; the other is a selfie, showing the moon glowing above some of Blue Ghost’s golden hardware. “While Blue Ghost is in Earth orbit, we’ll continue to keep an eye on our final destination! To the moon!” Firefly said in a…

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