Some guy.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which launched on the Artemis I mission on November 16th last month, made a successful return to Earth after doing two lunar flybys. It splashed down yesterday at 9:40 a.m. PST off the coast of California, 50 years to the day of the Apollo 17 landing, humankind’s last trip to the moon. Congrats […]
Earlier today, we saw the successful launch of the uncrewed Artemis I mission, the first launch in the Artemis missions that will bring humanity back to the moon again. Despite the numerous setbacks and delays, the rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft blasted off without incident from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 01:47:44 Eastern Time. […]
Two weeks ago, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) hit the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, with the goal of changing its orbital trajectory to see if we can indeed use a rocket to deflect asteroids. NASA’s press release yesterday confirms that they indeed managed to do this, after their team analyzed the data they’ve obtained thus […]
Ten months ago, NASA launched a rocket into space to rendezvous with Dimorphos, a tiny asteroid 11 million kilometers away. It was part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, a planetary defense test to see if we could deflect any incoming asteroids that might collide with Earth. On September 26, 2022, at 7:14 […]
Today NASA released a set of amazing images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, and I’ve saved them here for posterity. The first is a cluster of galaxies, called SMACS 0723. The light from these galaxies have taken billions and billions of years to reach us, and this is a snapshot from the earliest […]
The governor of Massachusetts has officially signed a bill for declaring Podokesaurus holyokensis the official state dinosaur (if we want to be pedantic, one of the official state dinosaurs, the others being the black-capped chickadee and the wild turkey). This came about after state rep Jack Lewis started an online poll last year asking the […]
Our little Linux-copter that could, Ingenuity, is still operational and flying around on Mars. On its 26th flight on April 19, 2022, it took a photo of the backshell and parachute that helped Perseverance land back in February.
A few hours ago, NASA released the first public image of a mirror-aligned James Webb Space Telescope, a big bright star brilliantly glowing in the night, and with other celestial objects also visible. According to the NASA press release, they found “no critical issues and no measurable contamination or blockages to Webb’s optical path”. A […]
Behold, the first image to be sent back by the James Webb Space Telescope! It’s still aligning the mirrors and doing other calibration routines, and this picture of 18 points of light is really 18 pictures of a single star: HD 84406 about 260 light years away. This is a test photo for calibration purposes, […]
Today, a month after launching from Earth, the JWST has safely made its way to its L2 orbit, a million miles away. Everyone can let out a sigh of relief now, as our 10 billion dollar investment is on its way to being paid off. Throughout the journey, the telescope had to unfurl itself, and […]