Category: The Moon

Our moon

NASA will beam Super Bowl LIX to orbit for astronauts aboard the International Space Station

NeRD

Are you ready to catch the big game? On Sunday (Feb. 9), across the United States and around the world, Americans and American football fans will tune in to watch the top two teams in the National Football League (NFL) go head-to-head in the ultimate post-season game, and even astronauts living in space will have the chance to watch the action live. Sunday evening, the American Football Conference (AFC) champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, will face off against the National Football Conference (NFC) champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in Super Bowl…

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This Week In Space podcast: Episode 147 — Not As They Seem

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Not As They Seem – Mick West on UFOs, Conspiracy Theories, and Pseudoscience – YouTube Watch On On Episode 147 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik speak with Mick West, a passionate conspiracy debunker who, rather uniquely, proceeds with kindness and empathy as he unravels some of the key pseudoscience of our time. Of particular interest to us is the spate of relatively recent videos of UFOs/UAPs from the US Navy, among other sources. He’s got a lot to say and took a deep dive into…

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Croatia’s 1st satellite captures its first views of home (photo)

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Croatia’s first ever satellite has just beamed to Earth the first image of its homeland. The satellite, called CroCube, is a 1U cubesat 3.3 by 3.3 by 3.3 inches (10 x 10 x 10 centimeters) in size. It launched to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in late December on the company’s Bandwagon-2 rideshare mission. The debut image, released via the mission’s Facebook page on Jan. 31, shows a cloud-covered outline of the Mediterranean country famous for its crystal blue sea and scenic coast. “Although our land is partly…

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Vast Space now aims for 2026 launch of Haven-1 space station after key milestone (photos)

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Vast Space is taking big steps toward putting the first commercial space station in orbit. The California-based startup recently completed a major testing milestone for the qualification vessel of its upcoming Haven-1 station, a benchmark Vast also used to reevaluate the launch date for the company’s first flight-ready module. “With the completion of our primary structure qualification test and a fully assembled team, we now have greater clarity on our build and launch schedule. As a result, we are updating our timeline,” Vast said in a statement. Haven-1 will ride…

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1st supernovas may have flooded the early universe with water — making life possible just 100 million years after the Big Bang

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When the cosmos’ first stars exploded in spectacular supernovas, they may have unleashed enormous amounts of water that flooded the early universe — and potentially made life possible just millions of years after the Big Bang, new simulations suggest. However, this theory clashes with our current understanding of cosmic evolution and will be extremely difficult to prove. Water is one of the most abundant compounds in the universe, according to NASA. Aside from Earth, astronomers have found water in several places throughout the solar system, including scattered above and below…

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‘Marsquakes’ may solve 50-year-old mystery about the Red Planet

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Recordings of Martian earthquakes, or “marsquakes,” collected by a robot on the Red Planet may have finally solved a 50-year-old mystery: why one half of Mars is so drastically different from the other. Since the 1970s, researchers have known that Mars is split into two main areas. The northern lowlands cover around two-thirds of the planet’s northern hemisphere, while the southern highlands cover the rest of the planet and have an average elevation roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) higher than that of the northern lowlands. Mars’ crust, which sits on…

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Putin axes Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s space agency

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Russia has a new space chief. Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed Yuri Borisov after 2.5 years in charge of the nation’s space agency Roscosmos, The Moscow Times reported today (Feb. 6). His replacement is 39-year-old Dmitry Bakanov, who most recently served as Russia’s deputy transport minister and led the state-backed Gonets satellite communications system from 2011 to 2019. New Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov, at the time deputy minister of transport of the Russian Federation, attends a session on “LET’S GO: Integrated Unmanned Freight Transport Hits the Motorway for the…

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What brand of golf ball did Alan Shepard hit off the moon? The world may never know

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Carlos Villagomez owns a golf ball that he believes was flown to the moon. If indeed it was, he may also hold the answer to a more than 50-year-old bit of trivia that otherwise may be forever lost to time. Villagomez was gifted the ball by Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut to fly into space, fifth human to walk on the moon and the world’s first (and to date, only) lunar golfer. Wrapping up his second of two moonwalks on NASA’s 1971 Apollo 14 mission, Shepard took a swing…

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Perseverance Mars rover finds ‘one-of-a-kind treasure’ on Red Planet’s Silver Mountain

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The Perseverance Mars rover has collected a rock sample on Mars unlike any other it has picked up so far. NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently exploring hills and rocky outcrops along the rim of Jezero Crater, where it has been collecting rock samples to reveal the area’s geological history. This week, NASA announced that the robotic explorer picked up a “one-of-a-kind treasure” in the form of a 1.1-inch (2.9-centimeter) rock sample from an area known as “Silver Mountain.” “My 26th sample, known as ‘Silver Mountain,’ has textures unlike anything we’ve…

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‘This idea that it takes like 250 years for Pluto to orbit the sun, I think that’s just bizarre.’ Star Trek scion Adam Nimoy talks our favorite (dwarf) planet for ‘I Heart Pluto’ festival

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The 95th anniversary of Pluto’s official discovery by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona is rapidly approaching and the historic location is gearing up to host a grand celebration on Feb. 13-17, 2025 with a five-day series of educational and social activities to mark the occasion. Lowell’s sixth annual “I Heart Pluto Festival” will honor the remote icy world that was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 and originally found at that location on Feb. 18, 1930. This year is also the tenth anniversary of NASA’s…

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