Tag: Space Exploration

Chinese commercial Ceres-1 rocket launches 5 weather satellites to orbit (video)

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A Chinese commercial space launch company is continuing its success with a small solid rocket ahead of a more ambitious launch later this year. The Ceres-1 four-stage solid propellant rocket lifted off at 5:11 a.m. EST on Jan. 20 (1011 GMT; or 8:11 p.m. local time) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, northwest China. Galactic Energy, the Ceres-1 manufacturer and operator, announced in a statement that five satellites had been successfully inserted into preplanned orbits. Aboard the flight were four Yunyao-1 commercial meteorological satellites (satellites 37-40)…

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Bill Nelson steps down as NASA chief as Trump begins 2nd term

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Bill Nelson has stepped down as NASA administrator, ending a half-century of public service. Nelson and NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy left the agency on Monday (Jan. 20), the day that Donald Trump began his second term as president. Trump has appointed Janet Petro, who most recently served as director of Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, as NASA’s interim chief. “As I leave public office today after 53 years, thank you for the great privilege of a lifetime of serving the people of our country. I am humbled and…

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Hubble Telescope spies newborn stars in famous Orion Nebula (photo)

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Two young stars shine bright in the dusty depths of the Orion Nebula in a new Hubble Space Telescope image. Located about 1,300 light-years from Earth, these young stars, also known as protostars, reside in a hotbed for star formation: the Orion Nebula, which is the nearest massive star-forming region to Earth and is home to hundreds of newborn stars. The recent photo from the Hubble Space Telescope captures two of these protostars, called HOPS 150 and HOPS 153, both of which take their names from the Herschel Orion Protostar…

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‘We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.’ President Trump wants astronauts to raise the American flag on Mars

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President Donald Trump wants to lead the United States to Mars. After taking the oath of office to be sworn in as the 47th U.S. president on Monday (Dec. 20), Trump laid out his vision for the next four years in an inauguration speech that called for a return to American expansionism and exploration. “My message to Americans today is that it is time for us to once again act with courage, vigor and the vitality of history’s greatest civilization,” Trump said during his speech inside the Capitol rotunda. “The…

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Space Force to march in Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, a 1st for the new military branch

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On Monday (Jan. 20), the U.S. Space Force will participate in a presidential inauguration for the first time. Representing the military branch will be 45 Guardians, the official name for U.S. Space Force personnel, who work in a wide range of careers across the country. The 45 Guardians, who are volunteers, recently arrived at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, a large military installation in Washington, D.C., where they’ve been practicing drills for Monday’s inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump. They’ve come together with the Space Force Honor Guard, which was founded 17 months…

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FAA requiring investigation into SpaceX Starship’s Flight 7 explosion

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The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is requiring an investigation into what went wrong during the seventh-ever test flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket yesterday (Jan. 16). The launch, from SpaceX‘s Starbase site in South Texas, went well at first. Starship got off the pad successfully, and its two stages — the Super Heavy booster and Ship spacecraft — separated on time. And the giant booster came back to Starbase, where it was caught by the launch tower’s “chopstick” arms. Ship was less successful, however. The flight plan called for the…

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Centuries-old supernova guides James Webb Space Telescope through an interstellar gap

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The spaces between stars in our galaxy are enigmatic realms filled with vast, diffuse clouds of gas and dust. These clouds tend to remain invisible — but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has managed to capture one in a rare moment when it was lit up. Peering at a dusty pocket of our galaxy about 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, the James Webb Space Telescope’s powerful infrared eyes watched as light from a centuries-old supernova illuminated interstellar material, warming it and causing it to glow. “This is…

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Major milestone! India becomes 4th nation to dock satellites in orbit

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India continues to prove out the abilities of its increasingly robust space program. The two satellites of the Indian Space Research Organization‘s (ISRO) Space Docking Experiment, or SpaDex, successfully met up in Earth orbit yesterday (Jan. 15), making India just the fourth country to pull off an in-space docking. The other three are all heavy hitters in the space game: the United States, Russia and China. “Spacecraft docking successfully completed! A historic moment,” ISRO said in an X post last night (Jan. 15). “Congratulations to the entire team! Congratulations to…

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Astronauts repair black hole observatory, inspect cosmic ray detector on ISS spacewalk

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An X-ray observatory used to study neutron stars is “back in the black” and a cosmic ray detector is ready for possible future upgrades after two astronauts completed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS). Nick Hague worked to repair the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, mounted to the outside of the space station, before he and Expedition 72 commander Suni Williams inspected the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) during a six-hour EVA (extravehicular activity) on Thursday (Jan. 16). Hague and Williams began the spacewalk at 8:01 a.m.…

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Here’s what NASA is sending to the moon on Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander

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Firefly Aerospace’s first mission to the moon is poised to launch in the early morning hours on Jan. 15. The company’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is sharing a payload bay with another mission to the moon’s surface, the Resilience probe from private Japanese company ispace. The two are launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled to liftoff no earlier than Wednesday, at 1:11 a.m. ET (0611 GMT), from Launch Complex-39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Blue Ghost Mission 1, which Firefly has dubbed Ghost Riders in…

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