Category: Solar System

Our solar system

Astronauts would have been fine on Boeing’s Starliner during landing, NASA says

NeRD

After more than three months in space, Starliner’s 10-day Crew Flight Test (CFT) has finally concluded. The Boeing spacecraft made a successful landing over the weekend, parachuting to a soft touchdown in the dark desert night of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) Saturday (Sep. 7). The return marked an end to a long-delayed and issue-ridden mission, which launched with two NASA astronauts, but returned with none. It turns out they would have been totally fine. Despite the issues it experienced on its flight…

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SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn astronauts will make a daring trek into Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt

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SpaceX’s trailblazing Polaris Dawn mission will soon begin its daring trek into Earth orbit — and with it, the plunge through the belt of radiation wrapped around our planet. The four-person crew of civilians, led by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, will lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida early on Tuesday (Sept. 10) after a series of launch delays attributed to technical issues and bad weather. Soon, the crew will attain a maximum height of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) — three times the altitude of the International Space…

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‘Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy’ premieres this week. Watch epic 1st clip (video)

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LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy | Punch It | Available September 13 on Disney+ – YouTube Watch On The brilliance of a Lego “Star Wars” show where the order of the galaxy far, far away has been tossed into a cosmic blender and reorganized in ways never imagined outside of online memes or backyard brick-building sessions cannot be overstated. Created by writers, showrunners, and executive producers Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, “Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy” takes flight as a four-issue miniseries starting on Sept. 13, 2024 exclusively…

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Doom games ranked, worst to best

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Whether you’re a veteran Slayer or new to the series, here’s our breakdown of all the Doom games ranked, worst to best. It’s hard (if not impossible) to understand the evolution of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre without having played the original Doom games. Their amazing level design and gunplay, brought to life with remarkable tech and a banging soundtrack, reshaped the entire medium forever. Even to this day, many developers are still honoring that Doom legacy, such as Auroch Digital’s Warhammer 40K: Boltgun. For the sake of simplicity and…

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SpaceX will start launching Starships to Mars in 2026, Elon Musk says

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SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will start flying Mars missions just two years from now, if all goes according to plan. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via X on Saturday evening (Sept. 7), in a post that announced the bold new target timelines. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions once every 26 months.) “Flight rate will grow exponentially…

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This Week In Space podcast: Episode 127 —Space Stations Inc.

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Space Stations Inc. – A Visit With Max Haot of VAST – YouTube Watch On On Episode 127 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik talk with Max Haot of VAST about his company’s first space station. We all know the ISS is living its last days and will be deorbited sometime around 2030… but what’s coming up next? Max Haot of VAST joins us to discuss his company’s first space station, called Haven-1, set to launch in 2025. For a company just just a few years…

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Boeing’s Starliner capsule just landed with no crew aboard. What’s next for this astronaut taxi?

NeRD

Boeing’s Starliner capsule just returned to Earth without astronauts, marking the beginning of a new set of investigations by NASA. Starliner left the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday evening (Sept. 6), then aced a landing in New Mexico just after midnight on Saturday (Sept. 7). The touchdown brought an end to Crew Flight Test (CFT), Starliner’s first-ever astronaut mission. But no astronauts came down with the capsule on Saturday; Starliner experienced problems with its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters shortly after CFT’s June 5 liftoff, and NASA decided not…

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See Saturn at its biggest and brightest tonight before its rings ‘disappear’ in 2025

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Saturn will reach opposition this weekend when the ringed planet and the sun are directly opposite of each other in the sky.  Just after midnight tonight, Saturn will appear at its biggest and brightest in the night sky. This is because Earth will be positioned directly between Saturn and the sun, offering stargazers a spectacular sight — and a chance to catch a glimpse of the planet’s rings before they turn edge on and “disappear” from view.  Appearing in the constellation Aquarius, Saturn will be visible for much of the…

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Mars leaks faster when closer to the sun

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Seasonal changes can have a dramatic effect on how quickly Mars loses its water to space, a joint study between the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission has shown. Over three billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, with large bodies of water on its surface and a thicker atmosphere. Today, however, Mars is desolate, cold and dry. So, what happened to all the water? “There’s only two places water can go,” John Clarke of the University of Boston said in a statement.…

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James Webb Space Telescope zooms in on giant question mark in space (image)

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Astronomers often have more questions than answers about the universe — and the universe, in turn, has asked its own question. Quite literally. Last year, the James Webb Space Telescope fortuitously spotted the unmistakable shape of a question mark across the sky. The uncanny feature was captured lurking at the bottom of an image of a pair of forming stars in the Vela constellation roughly 1,470 light-years from Earth. The picture soon went viral on social media sites, prompting a myriad of guesses of its nature, from a sign of…

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