Some guy.
Yesterday, at 12:06 p.m. EDT, NASA successfully launched the Europa Clipper mission from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After the launch was delayed because of the hurricane Milton in Florida, we had clear skies over Meritt Island yesterday and it was go time. Clipper’s mission is to embark on a five year plus trek across […]
A recent paper published in Nature reveals that NASA’s Juno probe has confirmed evidence of active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io. The probe’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) revealed that the surface of the Jovian moon is covered by lakes of lava. The data was collected during Juno’s flyby of Io in December last year, […]
Ingenuity has taken its final flight on Mars. On January 18th, NASA scientists saw that one of its rotor blades was damaged during landing, and thus it is grounded for good. The little robot copter was only meant to fly five times in 30 days, but it ended up making 72 flights and logged over […]
On December 11th, NASA did a deep space laser communication test from 19 million miles away by sending a UHD video of a cat from NASA’s Psyche mission which was launched on Oct. 13. The signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, and the data transfer rate was 267 megabits per second (Mbps). The video […]
The Lucy probe was launched by NASA way back in October of 2021 (I feel like I should have remembered this, and yet my memory is failing me). Its 12 year mission is to do flyby surveys of asteroids; two in the main asteroid belt and six more Trojan asteroids, which share an orbit with […]
On Sunday, September 24, 2023, a little capsule touched down in the Utah desert. It is the sample return mission from OSIRIS-REx, a space probe that touched down on asteroid 101955 Bennu in October of 2020, and collected a sample to return to Earth. I vaguely remember the touchdown on the asteroid, one of humanity’s […]
The ESA recently released this photo of a pair of stars being born, a brilliant image of Herbig-Haro 46/47, near the Gum Nebula. Taken by the JWST, the protostars are located somewhere at the center of the pink and orange diffraction spikes in the photo. The orange cloud is matter ejected from the young stars, […]
Checking in with the Perseverence rover, the news this week is the Martian donut, or rather a donut-shaped rock that the SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager snapped a photo of. Is it a meteorite fragment? That’s one theory, put forward by SETI, but when contacted by CNN, Jim Rice, a scientist in at Arizona State University, does […]
I swear I didn’t intend this to be a space news blog but I have to share this historic news, the crew of the first crewed mission to the moon in my lifetime. Meet the astronauts! Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will make a trip to the moon and back, although […]
Carnegie Mellon University is sending a rover built by students to the moon. Called “Iris”, this tiny rover is the size of a shoebox and weighs only 2kg. It is built from carbon fiber and will actually be the first American robot on the moon. The payload is being sent by commercial company United Launch […]