Category: Solar System

Our solar system

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is ‘go’ for May 6 astronaut launch

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Boeing’s new spaceship has been cleared for its first-ever crewed liftoff. Over the past two days, NASA and Boeing held a flight readiness review (FRR) for the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission, which will send agency astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to and from the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule. The FRR found no serious issues, meaning CFT is go for launch on May 6 as previously planned, NASA announced today (April 25). “I can say with confidence that the teams have absolutely done their due…

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Russian cosmonauts make quick work of space station spacewalk

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Two Russian cosmonauts completed a spacewalk at the International Space Station, wrapping up all of their tasks with time to spare, including the deployment of a radar that they began last year. Expedition 71 crewmates Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub successfully unfolded and latched the fourth of four panels for a synthetic radar communications system on the Russian Nauka multipurpose laboratory module (MLM) at 11:44 a.m. EDT (1544 GMT) on Thursday (April 25), 47 minutes after the spacewalk began.  “I will try first manually,” said Chub, who used his gloved…

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Curiosity rover may be ‘burping’ methane out of Mars’ subsurface

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Since 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has repeatedly detected methane on Mars, specifically near its landing site inside the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater.  But that Mars methane is behaving erratically. It only appears at night, it fluctuates seasonally and it spikes unexpectedly to levels 40 times higher than usual. To make things more puzzling, the gas isn’t present in appreciable amounts high in the Martian atmosphere, and it hasn’t been detected near the surface in other Red Planet locales. So what’s going on at Gale Crater? A group of NASA…

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Watch China launch 3 astronauts to Tiangong space station today

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China will launch its latest set of crewmembers to Tiangong space station today (April 25), and you can watch the action live. The three-astronaut Shenzhou 18 mission is scheduled to lift off atop a Long March 2F rocket from China’s Jiuquan spaceport at 8:59 a.m. EDT (1259 GMT; 8:59 p.m. Beijing time) on April 25. Watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of Chinese broadcaster CCTV. Coverage is expected to begin around 5:45 a.m. EDT (0945 GMT). Related: China rolls out rocket for next astronaut mission to Tiangong space station…

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Buried in the Cat’s Paw Nebula lies one of the largest space molecules ever seen

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Scientists have discovered a hitherto unknown space molecule while investigating a relatively nearby region of intense star birth, a cosmic spot about 5,550 light-years away. It’s part of the Cat’s Paw Nebula, also known as NGC 6334. The team, led by Zachary Fried, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), examined a section of the nebula known as NGC 6334I with the  Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). This revealed the presence of a complex molecule known as 2-methoxyethanol, which had never been seen before in the natural world, though…

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Netflix releases official trailer for Jennifer Lopez mech combat sci-fi film ‘Atlas’ (video)

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With “Atlas,” Netflix is clearly embracing bombastic summer spectacle in the vein of Amazon’s “The Tomorrow War.” That is, ‘original’ sci-fi flicks with hefty production budgets and killer casts to make up for the pastiche of well-trodden ideas. After 20th Century Studios’ stunningly-crafted “The Creator” bombed in theaters last year, maybe these should be released via streaming for the foreseeable future. After a ho-hum “Atlas” teaser (beyond the striking visuals) released for Brad Peyton’s Atlas – which has an interesting cast to say the least – Netflix has put the…

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NASA ends CloudSat Earth-observing mission after 18 years

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NASA’s pioneering CloudSat weather and climate mission has come to an end after nearly 18 productive years in Earth orbit.  The agency recently decommissioned the satellite, which launched in April 2006 on a planned 22-month mission to study the structure and composition of clouds.  “As planned, the spacecraft — having reached the end of its lifespan and no longer able to make regular observations — was lowered into an orbit last month that will result in its eventual disintegration in the atmosphere,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Tuesday (April…

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Earth’s weird ‘quasi-moon’ Kamo’oalewa is a fragment blasted out of big moon crater

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Earth’s “quasi-moon”  was likely blasted away from the actual moon relatively recently in the solar system’s history, a new study suggests.  Kamo’oalewa, a 131- to 328-foot-wide (40 to 100 meters) near-Earth object (NEO), was liberated by an asteroid impact between 1 million and 10 million years ago, a smashup that created the moon‘s 13.7-mile-wide (22 kilometers) Giordano Bruno crater, according to the research. Kamo’oalewa, or “469219 Kamoʻoalewa” as it is officially designated, was discovered in 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakalā, Hawaii, as part of NASA’s…

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Fortnite launches to the moon in new ‘Lunar Horizons’ simulation game

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With NASA’s return to the moon with Artemis 3 tentatively scheduled to touch down at the lunar south pole sometime in 2026, gamers can get into character as astronauts embarking on an expedition to our lone satellite via a new Fortnite-built  simulation packed with real-life details. The insanely popular free-to-play Fortnite video game franchise and cross-platform sensation was first introduced by Epic Games back in 2017 and has taken on a life of its own with millions of players scattered across the globe engaged in its three main gaming modes:…

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Cosmic fountain is polluting intergalactic space with 50 million suns’ worth of material

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Tremendous explosions in a galaxy close to the Milky Way are pouring material equivalent to around 50 million suns into its surroundings. Astronomers mapped this galactic pollution event in high resolution, obtaining important hints about how the space between galaxies becomes filled with chemical elements that eventually become the building blocks of new stars. The findings came about when the international team studied NGC 4383, a spiral galaxy in the Coma Berenices constellation, using a Very Large Telescope (VLT) instrument called the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE).  Located around 62…

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