Category: Solar System

Our solar system

Meet the ‘Doctor Who’ actors who brought the retrofuturistic robots to life for season 2’s ‘The Robot Revolution’ (interview)

NeRD

Stomping around in bulky retro-style robot suits filming the opening episode of “Doctor Who” Season 2 might have seemed like fun, but for professional creature artists Stephen Love and Rob Strange it can be quite hazardous… especially if you topple over! “When you fell, you just had to surrender to it and wait until you stopped rolling around,” Strange reveals. “It felt very safe, but it looked pretty dramatic.” Love and Strange are the main puppeteer actors inside the old-fashioned android costumes for “The Robot Revolution,” which kicked off Ncuti…

Read More

International Dark Sky Week 2025: See these 10 night sky sights to celebrate

NeRD

April 21 – 28 is International Dark Sky Week, a global celebration of the night sky during which like-minded organizations and people take action to raise awareness of an inevitable aspect of modern-day life: the rising scourge of light pollution. Light pollution is a serious issue for night sky enthusiasts hoping to explore the cosmos from our vantage point on Earth, and is the primary reason why powerful observatories are built in remote locations, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile. Even so, a 2022 study from the Royal Astronomical…

Read More

‘We learned so much that we didn’t know’: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost moon lander mission was full of surprises

NeRD

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado — Lessons learned and on-the-spot surprises from the first fully successful commercial lunar lander mission bolsters the chances of long-term robotic and human operations on the moon. The Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost Mission 1 safely touched down on March 2 within the targeted Mare Crisium landing zone. Plopping down on its four landing legs, the spacecraft delivered ten science instruments and technology demonstration gear through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Blue Ghost completed more than 14 days of surface operations during 346 hours of daylight,…

Read More

Senators press Jared Isaacman, Trump’s pick for NASA chief, on his ties to Elon Musk

NeRD

Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s choice to lead NASA, keeps having to explain his ties to Elon Musk. The topic came up repeatedly during Isaacman’s nomination hearing, which the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held on April 9. Multiple Democratic senators pressed the 42-year-old billionaire on his relationship with the SpaceX chief, who was a prominent supporter of Trump’s campaign and is now a close adviser to the president. For example, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked Isaacman repeatedly if Musk was in the room at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate,…

Read More

Amateur astrophotographer captures a stunning galaxy 24 million light-years from Earth (photo)

NeRD

Astrophotographer Ron Brecher has captured a stunning deep sky image of the spiral galaxy M106, located 23.5 million light years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. Brecher imaged the distant galaxy for a little over 32 hours on nights spanning from March 27 to April 17, 2025. The finished portrait reveals the swirling arms of M106 focussed around an active, red-hued galactic core – an active star-forming region that is home to a ravenous supermassive black hole. “M106 is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, meaning it has an active nucleus,”…

Read More

New moon of April 2025 sees Venus and Saturn join up in the sky this weekend

NeRD

The new moon occurs April 27, and a day later Venus and Saturn will make a close approach to each other (known as a conjunction) in the predawn sky. To make a new moon, you need to line up the sun, moon and Earth. From the earthbound observer’s viewpoint, the sun and moon are at the same celestial longitude, a projection of the Earth’s longitude lines on the sky. Most often the moon passes above or below the sun but at times it passes directly between the sun and Earth,…

Read More

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 28 Starlink satellites, aces droneship booster landing (photos)

NeRD

SpaceX continues its steady pace of Starlink launches, ever growing the company’s orbital internet constellation. A Falcon 9 rocket launched SpaceX‘s Starlink 6-74 mission Thursday night, April 24, out of Florida’s Space Coast. Liftoff occurred at 9:52 p.m. ET (0152 GMT, April 25) from Launch Complex-40 (LC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Stacked 28-tall inside the Falcon 9 fairing, the newest additions to SpaceX’s Starlink megaconstellation headed toward low Earth orbit (LEO), powered by the Falcon 9’s nine first-stage Merlin engines. A closeup shot of the Falcon 9’s first-stage…

Read More

Happy 35th birthday, Hubble Telescope! 10 times the iconic observatory blew astronomers’ minds (photos)

NeRD

For 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has served as humanity’s tireless eye in the sky, capturing breathtaking views of the cosmos and transforming our understanding of the universe. The school-bus-sized observatory launched on April 24, 1990 and overcame early setbacks to become one of the most scientifically productive instruments in history. From its vantage point 320 miles (515 kilometers) above Earth, the telescope has sent home more than 1.6 million observations contributing to over 21,000 scientific papers. The Hubble Telescope‘s legacy lies not just in its iconic visuals, but…

Read More

Aging gracefully: The Hubble Telescope is in ‘excellent technical condition’ on its 35th birthday, its chief scientist says

NeRD

The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 35th anniversary in space today, but even as a senior citizen in the spacecraft population, it is showing no sign of slowing down. “Hubble is more scientifically productive now than ever before, which is kind of mind-blowing,” Jennifer Wiseman, the Senior Project Scientist for Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com. Launched in 1990 by NASA and operated jointly with the European Space Agency, the Hubble Space Telescope was a dream brought to reality. All of a sudden, scientists could harness…

Read More

Rocket Lab introduces line of customizable solar arrays for satellites

NeRD

Rocket Lab is showing that’s about more than just rockets. The California-based company has introduced a family of customizable solar arrays, designed to fit the changing needs of customer satellites. Rocket Lab is offering the new Standardized Array, or STARRAY, line as an alternative to save first- or one-time satellite manufacturers the time of designing and testing their own solar arrays from ground, up. The line was introduced earlier this month, at the 40th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “Customers can choose from a range of pre-engineered solar array…

Read More