Category: Solar System

Our solar system

Major telescope makers hit by class action lawsuit over alleged price fixing

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Skywatchers who purchased telescopes from leading suppliers may be entitled to a payment from a $32 million class action settlement. The settlement is a result of a lengthy legal saga involving telescope manufacturers controlled by Chinese family firms Synta Technologies and Ningbo Sunny, which, according to allegations in available documents, actively conspired to monopolize and divide up the U.S. amateur telescope market to fix prices and push out competitors. The brands covered in the class action include the popular Celestron, Meade, Olivon and Sky-Watcher telescopes, which have for years been…

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FAA requiring investigation into SpaceX Starship’s Flight 7 explosion

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The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is requiring an investigation into what went wrong during the seventh-ever test flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket yesterday (Jan. 16). The launch, from SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas, went well at first. Starship got off the pad successfully, and its two stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — separated on time. And the giant booster came back to Starbase, where it was caught by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms. Ship was less successful, however. The flight plan called for the…

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Centuries-old supernova guides James Webb Space Telescope through an interstellar gap

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The spaces between stars in our galaxy are enigmatic realms filled with vast, diffuse clouds of gas and dust. These clouds tend to remain invisible — but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has managed to capture one in a rare moment when it was lit up. Peering at a dusty pocket of our galaxy about 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, the James Webb Space Telescope’s powerful infrared eyes watched as light from a centuries-old supernova illuminated interstellar material, warming it and causing it to glow. “This is…

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Major milestone! India becomes 4th nation to dock satellites in orbit

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India continues to prove out the abilities of its increasingly robust space program. The two satellites of the Indian Space Research Organization‘s (ISRO) Space Docking Experiment, or SpaDex, successfully met up in Earth orbit yesterday (Jan. 15), making India just the fourth country to pull off an in-space docking. The other three are all heavy hitters in the space game: the United States, Russia and China. “Spacecraft docking successfully completed! A historic moment,” ISRO said in an X post last night (Jan. 15). “Congratulations to the entire team! Congratulations to…

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Astronauts repair black hole observatory, inspect cosmic ray detector on ISS spacewalk

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An X-ray observatory used to study neutron stars is “back in the black” and a cosmic ray detector is ready for possible future upgrades after two astronauts completed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS). Nick Hague worked to repair the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, mounted to the outside of the space station, before he and Expedition 72 commander Suni Williams inspected the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) during a six-hour EVA (extravehicular activity) on Thursday (Jan. 16). Hague and Williams began the spacewalk at 8:01 a.m.…

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Space Mountain at 50: Five nods to NASA from the Walt Disney World ride

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“We astronauts are here today to salute all those who made our trip into space possible. They have permitted us to see the Earth as a precious blue jewel in the blackness of space. Now all of us may enjoy this sense of wonder because of Walt Disney.” With those words 50 years ago today (Jan. 15), Apollo 15 moonwalker Jim Irwin opened Space Mountain at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom in Florida. Later to be reproduced at other Disney theme parks, this was the original — the first roller…

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Battlestar Galactica at 20: the show that reinvented space opera

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If you wanted to assemble a time capsule of late 1970s pop culture, the original “Battlestar Galactica” would be a good place to start. Not only was it an unashamed attempt to cash in on the record-breaking success of “Star Wars” — to the extent that George Lucas’s lawyers wrote some very angry letters — the disco stylings of Glen A. Larson’s big-budget TV space opera tie it to a very specific time in history. The show’s wholesome family values, robot dogs, and kitschy, “Saturday Night Fever”-esque fashions always jarred…

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The 7 best total solar eclipses of the next 10 years

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Eclipse-watchers have plenty to look forward to in the next decade. Over the next ten years, Earth will experience seven total solar eclipses that will see skywatchers in Australia, Egypt, Spain and Sudan peer up at the central shadow of the moon. The first of these eclipses will take place on Aug. 12, 2026, and the final one will be on March 20, 2034, with the maximum durations of totality of each total solar eclipse ranging from 1 minute, 8 seconds to 6 minutes, 23 seconds. Here are the important…

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Here’s what NASA is sending to the moon on Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander

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Firefly Aerospace’s first mission to the moon is poised to launch in the early morning hours on Jan. 15. The company’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is sharing a payload bay with another mission to the moon’s surface, the Resilience probe from private Japanese company ispace. The two are launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled to liftoff no earlier than Wednesday, at 1:11 a.m. ET (0611 GMT), from Launch Complex-39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Blue Ghost Mission 1, which Firefly has dubbed Ghost Riders in…

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Rubin Observatory aces 1st image tests, gets ready to use world’s largest digital camera

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — A giant new telescope in Chile has opened its eyes for the first time — and while the view may not be impressive to some, its scientist parents are thrilled. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, an 8.4-meter telescope built by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, successfully passed a series of critical systems tests and even snapped early images of the sky with an engineering camera. The result? A clean bill of health and an early set of images that…

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