Stories about the wondrous world of space science.
Each year on this day, the UN honors a little-known event called Asteroid Day. On Asteroid Day, we remember the 1908 Tunguska asteroid, which entered the atmosphere over Siberia and leveled more than 2000 sq km of forest. The event is dedicated to raising public awareness of the risk of asteroid impacts and the importance […]
The Biden administration hosted a pair of events last week showcasing two of its top priorities for space: fighting climate change and promoting diversity in the industry. A warming climate: On Wednesday morning, NASA hosted a ribbon cutting for its Earth Information Center, an interactive exhibit at the space agency’s HQ in DC that’s been […]
Euclid, ESA’s dark energy surveyor satellite, is slated to launch July 1 aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, the space agency announced this week. Ministry of magic: The spacecraft, named after the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, will map the cosmos in 3D and study how dark energy shapes the universe. Scientists hope the data will […]
Noah Petro will be the science lead for Artemis III, which aims to return humans to the Moon by mid-decade, officials announced last week during NASA’s Artemis town hall briefing at the 54th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC). Petro is the project scientist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The satellite’s observations have helped […]
Blue Origin is opening up about some of its latest interplanetary work. Last week, the Washington company announced two science initiatives supporting humanity’s efforts to push outward into the cosmos. On Thursday, NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract to provide launch services for the ESCAPADE mission to study the magnetosphere of Mars. And on Friday, […]
The brave new world of large language models (LLMs) has finally dealt us a space angle. This week, accompanying a Paris event to preview its new Bard chatbot, Google released an ad about the ChatGPT competitor. The issue? Bard confidently shared an incorrect answer about JWST. The incorrect answer, first shared Monday but widely circulated […]
For the first orbital launch of 2023, SpaceX’s Transporter-6 mission launched 114 small satellites into orbit. The spacecraft on the manifest ranged from cubesats to hosted payloads to orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs). The Transporter satellite rideshare missions increasingly remind us of nesting dolls, as they launch space vehicles that in turn deploy even more space […]
Here we are, in the final weeks of 2022, having learned so much about the vast, mysterious universe we live in. Here’s a recap of some of the biggest moments in space science this year. Eyes on the sky Last Christmas, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope in its mission to, as the agency […]
‘Twas a busy time in Paris last week. The European Space Agency announced a new cohort of astronauts and announced a budget of €16.9B for the next three years. The sum falls short of the €18.5B requested by the agency, but still represents a 17% increase over the prior period. Lots of 17s last week: […]
Since launching on November 16, the Artemis I core mission has gone off practically without a hitch (unless you count damage to the elevator doors near the pad as a vital loss). SLS successfully carried the Orion capsule out of the Earth’s atmosphere and sent it on its trajectory to the Moon, where it made […]
Hubble needs a boost, and SpaceX has stepped up to provide it. Yesterday, NASA and SpaceX announced that they’ve teamed up through an unfunded Space Act agreement to conduct a feasibility study into whether a crewed commercial mission could boost Hubble’s orbit and extend its lifetime. Hubble: an abridged history When the Hubble space telescope […]
At last, justice for the dinosaurs. Last night, NASA’s first planetary defense mission ended with a bang. Years in the making, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos. With DART, NASA hopes to test whether it would be possible to protect our pale blue dot from potential oncoming planet-killing asteroids […]
