On Nov. 19, SpaceX launched its Starship vehicle on its sixth test flight. While the flight showcased key technical advancements, such as a successful engine relight on the Starship upper stage, it also highlighted the challenges of reusability, with the Super Heavy booster failing to land back at the launch tower. This incremental progress … Read more
The latest “Lower Decks” episode, “Upper Decks”, reveals what the command crew gets up to when Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn aren’t hogging all that main character energy. So, as the lead quintet gets busy “mutilating gourds” for Halloween — everyone but T’Lyn would describe it as carving pumpkins — “Upper Decks” shows that … Read more
The Artemis moon landings are delayed again due to technical difficulties. This time, the problem is with the Orion spacecraft heat shield. NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that the new landing dates are in April of 2026 for Artemis II and sometime in 2027 for the first human landing during the Artemis III mission. The … Read more
The staggering and unexplained deaths of over 300 African elephants in early 2020 — one of the largest mass mortality events of wild mammals in recent history — was most likely due to toxins in water that proliferated due to climate extremes, according to a fresh analysis of a decade’s worth of satellite data. The … Read more
All those spaceships, droids, lightsabers, and scoundrels had a big part to play in capturing the imaginations of a generation back in 1977. Even so, there’s a much subtler moment that arguably defines the original ‘Star Wars’ movie better than any other. Young farmer Luke Skywalker, told by his uncle that he needs to stay … Read more
Our understanding of the Universe is profound. Only a century ago, astronomers held a Great Debate to argue over whether our galaxy was an island universe, or whether nebulae such as Andromeda were galaxies in a much larger cosmos. Now we know that the Universe is billions of years old, ever expanding to billions of … Read more
We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see the first crewed moon mission since the Apollo era lift off. NASA announced today (Dec. 5) that it’s delaying the planned launch of Artemis 2, a flight that will send four people around the moon and back, from September 2025 to April 2026. And Artemis 3, … Read more
Fine particles from ship exhaust act as seeds for clouds, as shown in this satellite image. Tighter regulations on marine pollution means that there are fewer ship tracks to reflect sunlight back into space. This may be one reason that Earth is warming faster than models predicted — but not the only one, a new … Read more
WISE, NEOWISE’s predecessor mission, imaged the entire sky in the mid-infrared range. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/UCLA The NASA project NEOWISE, which has given astronomers a detailed view of near-Earth objects – some of which could strike the Earth – ended its mission and burned on re-entering the atmosphere after over a decade. On a clear night, the … Read more
For the past thirty years, NASA’s Great Observatories – the Hubble, Spitzer, Compton, and Chandra space telescopes – have revealed some amazing things about the Universe. In addition to some of the deepest views of the Universe provided by the Hubble Deep Fields campaign, these telescopes have provided insight into the unseen parts of the … Read more