Imagine building a shield in orbit to protect Earth against environmental destruction — a fleet of cooperative satellites forming a massive umbrella that reduces solar energy reaching Earth, mitigating the impacts of climate change. This might sound like science fiction or a politically impossible dream, but it’s neither. It’s an engineering and governance challenge the … Read more
For the latest on Parker Solar Probe, watch the livestream above at 12:15 CST (18:15 UTC) on Friday, December 20, 2024, with EarthSky founder Deborah Byrd and heliophysicist C. Alex Young of NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, co-author of EarthSky’s daily sun news update. Join us in marveling at a spacecraft that can touch the sun! … Read more
In 1971, the Soviet Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars, though it only lasted a couple of minutes before failing. More than 50 years later, it’s still there at Terra Sirenum. The HiRISE camera NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may have imaged some of its hardware, inadvertently taking part in what … Read more
Modern-day farming is a high-tech operation highly dependent on GPS-guided tractors revolutionizing the way crops are planted, fertilized and harvested. But on May 10, 2024, that system came under attack, not from mechanical failure or sophisticated hackers, but from the sun itself. On that day, the sun unleashed its largest geomagnetic storm in decades. The … Read more
When Oumuamua traversed our Solar System in 2017 it was the first confirmed Interstellar Object (ISO) to do so. Then in 2019, Comet 2l/Borisov did the same thing. These are the only two confirmed ISOs to visit our Solar System. Many more ISOs must have visited in our Solar System’s long history, and many more … Read more