Radio telescope will launch to moon’s far side in 2025 to hunt for the cosmic Dark Ages

A small mission to test technology to detect radio waves from the cosmic Dark Ages over 13.4 billion years ago will blast off for the far side of the moon in 2025. The Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment-Night mission, or LuSEE-Night for short, is a small radio telescope being funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy with involvement from scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota. LuSEE-Night will blast off as part of NASA’s Commercial…

Read More

‘Ahsoka’ season 1 episode 7 review: Fast-paced action in the vein of Rebels ahead of the big finale

Whether you like the overall direction of the show or not, it’s hard to deny Ahsoka has been a surprising ride with a voice of its own. While the marketing suggested the new Dave Filoni-led series would essentially be a fifth season of Star Wars Rebels (but in live-action), the final result is more of a deeply spiritual expansion of the Star Wars universe’s stranger side alongside nimble adventures, something which culminated completely with last week’s fable-like chapter. Episode 7 is titled ‘Dreams and Madness’ and was directed by Geeta…

Read More

Harvest moon 2023, the last supermoon of the year, kicks off fall stargazing on Sept. 29

This Friday’s full moon will be a somewhat special one in that it will carry the title of “Harvest Moon” for those living in the Northern Hemisphere.  The moon officially will turn full when it reaches a spot in the sky opposite (180-degrees) to the sun. This moment will occur on Friday (Sept. 29) at 09:57 Greenwich Time (or in the Eastern Time zone, just prior to moonset at 5:57 a.m.).  It also turns out that this full moon is the one that comes closest to the September equinox. In 2023,…

Read More

Record-setting NASA astronaut lands with Russian crewmates after 1 year on space station

The first American to spend a full year in space and the first two Russians to do the same on the International Space Station (ISS) have landed safely back on Earth. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos returned from the space station aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft on Wednesday (Sept. 27). Their touchdown at 7:17 a.m. EDT (1117 GMT or 5:14 p.m. local time) on the steppe of Kazakhstan ended an extended 371-day stay in space for all…

Read More

Learn the true stories of NASA’s 1st women astronauts in new book ‘The Six’ (exclusive)

 NASA changed forever in 1978 with the addition of new kinds of astronauts. That year, NASA accepted women and people of color into the astronaut corps for the first time, and the new book “The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts” (Scribner, 2023) by Loren Grush shares the true firsthand stories of the female pioneers in that group. Grush’s book focuses on the stories of astronauts Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid and Rhea Seddon, while also talking about the decades of discrimination…

Read More