Tag: Space Exploration

SpaceX will start launching Starships to Mars in 2026, Elon Musk says

NeRD

SpaceX’s Starship megarocket will start flying Mars missions just two years from now, if all goes according to plan. “These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years,” SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via X on Saturday evening (Sept. 7), in a post that announced the bold new target timelines. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions once every 26 months.) “Flight rate will grow exponentially…

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Boeing’s Starliner capsule just landed with no crew aboard. What’s next for this astronaut taxi?

NeRD

Boeing’s Starliner capsule just returned to Earth without astronauts, marking the beginning of a new set of investigations by NASA. Starliner left the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday evening (Sept. 6), then aced a landing in New Mexico just after midnight on Saturday (Sept. 7). The touchdown brought an end to Crew Flight Test (CFT), Starliner’s first-ever astronaut mission. But no astronauts came down with the capsule on Saturday; Starliner experienced problems with its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters shortly after CFT’s June 5 liftoff, and NASA decided not…

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James Webb Space Telescope zooms in on giant question mark in space (image)

NeRD

Astronomers often have more questions than answers about the universe — and the universe, in turn, has asked its own question. Quite literally. Last year, the James Webb Space Telescope fortuitously spotted the unmistakable shape of a question mark across the sky. The uncanny feature was captured lurking at the bottom of an image of a pair of forming stars in the Vela constellation roughly 1,470 light-years from Earth. The picture soon went viral on social media sites, prompting a myriad of guesses of its nature, from a sign of…

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NASA delays ESCAPADE Mars launch on Blue Origin’s giant New Glenn rocket to 2025 to avoid potential cost overruns

NeRD

Blue Origin’s huge New Glenn rocket won’t debut next month after all. New Glenn, the company’s partially reusable new heavy lifter, had been scheduled to launch NASA’s twin ESCAPADE Mars probes from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida during an eight-day window that opens on Oct. 13. But that’s no longer the plan. “The agency’s decision to stand down was based on a review of launch preparations and discussions with Blue Origin, the Federal Aviation Administration and Space Launch Delta 45 Range Safety Organization, as well as NASA’s Launch Services Program…

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NASA spacecraft captures 1st photo of its giant solar sail while tumbling in space

NeRD

On April 23, NASA launched a solar sail protype to orbit around our planet — a piece of technology that could very well revolutionize the way we think about spacecraft propulsion. Then, on Aug. 29, the agency confirmed this sail successfully unfurled itself in outer space. Yet, we still didn’t have official photographic evidence of this for some time.  Now, as of Sept. 5, we indeed do. NASA has released the first image of the open solar sail, formally called the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, and stated that the…

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Chinese astronauts study ancient microbes aboard Tiangong space station (video)

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Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station are studying anaerobic archaea in an experiment to determine if some of Earth’s early forms of life can handle a simulated cosmic environment. Shenzhou 18 crewmembers — commander Ye Guangfu and crewmates Li Cong and Li Guangsu — have been aboard the Tiangong space station since late April and have been busy conducting spacewalks and running experiments. That scientific work includes research on space radiation damage and adaptability of anaerobic archaea, as a newly released video shows.  China’s Shenzhou 18 astronauts perform research…

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Hubble Telescope spies a very sparkly mini-galaxy (image)

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New images released by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are of the Pegasus Dwarf spheroidal galaxy, also known as Andromeda VI.  Pegasus is located in the Andromeda Galaxy, also called Messier 31, which is the Milky Way’s closest neighbour at about 2,480,000 light-years away from Earth. As such, Andromeda is one of the few galaxies visible to the naked eye — best observed in November. The images were captured as part of a re-examination of the entire Andromeda system, meant to gather further information to answer long-standing questions related to dark…

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Thruster issues delay BepiColombo probe’s Mercury arrival until November 2026

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The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft is set for a Mercury flyby late on Wednesday (Sept. 4), but thruster issues mean the probe faces a lengthy delay before entering orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet. BepiColombo launched in 2018 on an Ariane 5 rocket to seek out answers to mysteries surrounding Mercury. Its circuitous route to entering orbit around Mercury involves one Earth flyby, a pair of Venus flybys and six more around Mercury itself. The Sept. 4 flyby will be BepiColombo’s fourth of Mercury to date.  However, plans for…

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‘Unbreakable’ quantum communication closer to reality thanks to new, exceptionally bright photons

NeRD

Scientists have created an “exceptionally bright” light source that can generate quantum-entangled photons (particles of light) which could be used to securely transmit data in a future high-speed quantum communications network. A future quantum internet could transmit information using pairs of entangled photons — meaning the particles share information over time and space regardless of distance. Based on the weird laws of quantum mechanics, information encoded into these entangled photons can be transferred at high speeds while their “quantum coherence” — a state in which the particles are entangled —…

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SpaceX launches back-to-back Falcon 9 rockets within 65 minutes and aces 2 landings days after a failed booster touchdown

NeRD

SpaceX launched two Falcon 9 rockets in just over an hour early Saturday (Aug. 31) and nailed back-to-back booster landings three days after a recent failure. The two Falcon 9 launches — which lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, respectively — delivered a total of 42 Starlink internet satellites into orbit, with each rocket’s first stage acing an offshore landing. The successful SpaceX landings followed a failed Falcon 9 rocket landing on Aug. 28 during a booster’s 23rd flight, a record…

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