Category: Space Stations

Space stations in orbit or planned

NASA Harvests Lettuce for Space Station Study

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Inside a laboratory in the Space Systems Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a payload implementation team member harvests ‘Outredgeous’ romaine lettuce growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat ground unit on Thursday, April 24, 2025. The harvest is part of the ground control work supporting Plant Habitat-07, which launched to the International Space Station aboard NASA’s SpaceX 31st commercial resupply services mission. The experiment focuses on studying how optimal and suboptimal moisture conditions affect plant growth, nutrient content, and the plant microbiome in microgravity. Research like this…

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The Eta Aquarid meteor shower peaks May 6. Here’s what to expect from the ‘crumbs’ of Halley’s Comet

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Among the top 10 meteor showers appearing annually, one of the best will be reaching its peak on Tuesday morning (May 6). The Eta Aquarid shower ranks among the top four in terms of overall activity. Because the meteors appear to emanate from a spot on the sky (called the “radiant”) in the Water Jar of the Aquarius constellation — hence the name “Aquarids” — their visibility favors prospective skywatchers south of the equator. Indeed, for those living in the Southern Hemisphere (Santiago, Johannesburg Melbourne, Auckland), the Eta Aquarid radiant…

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NASA Kicks Off Biological Research Aboard Space Station

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Crew members are kicking off operations for several biological experiments that recently launched to the International Space Station aboard NASA’s 32nd SpaceX commercial resupply services mission. These include examining how microgravity affects production of protein by microalgae, testing a microscope to capture microbial activity, and studying genetic activity in biofilms. Microalgae in microgravity Sophie’s BioNutrients This ice cream is one of several products made with a protein powder created from Chlorella microalgae by researchers for the SOPHONSTER investigation, which looks at whether the stress of microgravity affects the algae’s protein…

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How to see a celestial ‘gazelle’ cross the night sky close to the Big Dipper this week

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With the constellation Ursa Major high in the sky, late April presents an ideal opportunity to spot the ‘Three Leaps of the Gazelle’ asterism – a set of three stellar pairings hanging below the Great Bear‘s most famous feature: the seven stars of the Big Dipper. The first mention of the Three Leaps of the Gazelle asterism was seemingly penned by the 13th century Arabic astronomer and mathematician Ulugh Beg, according to a 2021 post from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The three star pairings – an asterism…

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Capture May’s full moon and the Eta Aquarid meteor shower with the best DSLR for astrophotography, now $600 off

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The Nikon D850 has been reduced from $2,396.95 to a staggering $1,796.95, which is an incredible discount if you’re in the market for one of the best DSLR cameras ever made. It’s the first time we’ve seen the D850 come in at under $2,000, even beating the Black Friday price (which was $2,196.95). Get the Nikon D850 for just $1,796.95 and save $600 at Adorama. Our resident camera guru, Jase Parnell-Brookes, called the D850 an astrophotography master, and Jase highlighted the Nikon D850’s brilliant design with its backlit buttons, excellent…

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What can ripples in spacetime reveal about black holes? Quite a bit, it turns out

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Cosmic echoes from some of the universe’s most violent collisions are far more nuanced than scientists had realized, according to new research. Like the lingering chime of a struck bell, tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime are created when massive objects like black holes spiral toward each other and merge into a single, larger black hole. These ripples are known as “gravitational waves,” and astronomers rely on theoretical models to decode the waves’ faint signals, both in the final moments leading up to the merger and in the aftermath.…

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See a wafer-thin crescent moon leapfrog Jupiter this week

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The delicate form of the crescent moon is set to draw close to the planet Jupiter in the post-sunset sky on April 29, before later making its closest approach to the gas giant from the perspective of Earth on April 30. Earth’s moon is currently emerging from its April 27 new moon phase, during which it passed between the sun and Earth, causing its shadow-drenched disk to be temporarily lost from sight in the sun‘s glare. In the coming days the moon will form a waxing crescent, which will grow…

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40-year-old spy satellite photos are helping find forgotten land mines in Cambodia

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Declassified images from U.S. military satellites are helping find forgotten mine fields in Cambodia. From the late 1960s almost until the end of the 1990s, a bloody war between communist groups and democracy defenders raged, with a few short breaks, in the jungles and on the rice fields of Cambodia. The conflict left behind a hidden legacy that keeps increasing the war’s death toll to this day. Over 10 million anti-personnel and anti-vehicle mines and other explosives may have been scattered across Cambodia’s land during the decades of fighting. Over…

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Brand-new Falcon 9 rocket sends 23 Starlink satellites to orbit on SpaceX’s 2nd launch of the day

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SpaceX sent another batch of Starlink satellites to orbit tonight (April 28), its second liftoff of the day. A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 Starlink broadband satellites — including 13 with direct-to-cell capability — lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida tonight at 10:34 p.m. EDT (0234 GMT on April 29). It was the second Starlink group to fly today; a Falcon 9 lofted 27 of the internet craft from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base earlier today. You may like The Falcon 9’s first stage rests on the…

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Newly launched NASA satellites open eyes to start studying ‘auroral electrojets’ in Earth’s atmosphere

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The first bits of data have come back from the trio of small satellites that make up NASA’s EZIE (Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer) mission, which aims to solve some mysteries surrounding the “auroral electrojet” phenomena in our atmosphere. The “first light” observations are promising, and NASA says the EZIE satellites are “poised to reveal crucial details about Earth’s auroral electrojets.” After launching March 14 from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on SpaceX’s Transporter 13 rideshare mission, EZIE’s three suitcase-sized cubesats now orbit a few hundred miles above Earth in a…

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