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World’s Largest Rocket Will Be Recoverable & Reusable When Elon Musk launched SpaceX in 2002, he did so with the intention of making reusability a central feature of his company. Designed to lower the costs associated with launches, being able to reuse boosters was also a means of making space more accessible. “If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes,” he said, “the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred.” And with last week’s successful launch of the first reusable Falcon 9 (the SES-10 Mission) Musk chose to unveil moreRead More →

Worlds’ 1st Recycled Booster from SpaceX Sails Serenely at Sunrise into Port Canaveral – Photo/Video Gallery World’s first reflown rocket booster – the SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage – sails back into Port Canaveral, FL just before sunrise atop OCISLY droneship on which it landed 9 minutes after March 30, 2017 liftoff from KSC with SES-10 telecomsat – as seen entering channels mouth trailing a flock of birds from Jetty Park pier on April 4, 2017. Credit: Ken Kremer/Kenkremer.com PORT CANAVERAL/KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – Basking in the sunrise glow, the world’s first recycled booster – namely a SpaceX Falcon 9 – sailed serenely intoRead More →

Cassini’s Final Mission to Annihilation Starts April 22 Grab the tissues. This video nearly had the Cassini team all choked up during today’s press briefing, and virtual sobs and sniffs were abundant on social media posts sharing the video. “We get goosebumps and get emotional every time we see it,” said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at JPL. On April 22 the Cassini spacecraft will begin its ‘Grand Finale’ — the beginning of the end of this tremendous mission that has provided breathtaking images and so many new discoveries of Saturn, its rings and moons. The mission will end on September 15, 2017, when itRead More →

TRAPPIST-1 Is Showing A Bit Too Much Flare It turns out that the TRAPPIST-1 star may be a terrible host for the TRAPPIST planets announced in February. The TRAPPIST-1 star, a Red Dwarf, and its 7 planets caused a big stir in February when it was discovered that 3 of the rocky planets are in the habitable zone. But now more data is coming which suggests that the TRAPPIST-1 star is much too volatile for life to exist on its planets. Red Dwarfs are much dimmer than our Sun, but they also last much longer. Their lifetimes are measured in trillions of years, not billions.Read More →

Extraterrestrial Origin Of Fast Radio Burst Phenomenon Confirmed Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) have puzzled astronomers since they were first detected in 2007. These mysterious milliseconds-long blasts of radio waves appear to be coming from long distances, and have been attributed to various things such as alien signals or extraterrestrial propulsion systems, and more ‘mundane’ objects such as extragalactic neutron stars. Some scientists even suggested they were some type of ‘local’ source, such as atmospheric phenomena on Earth, tricking astronomers about their possible distant origins. So far, less than two dozen FRBs have been detected in a decade. But now researchers from the Australian National UniversityRead More →

Venus 2.0 Discovered In Our Own Back Yard It has been an exciting time for exoplanet research of late! Back in February, the world was astounded when astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced the  discovery of seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system, all of which were comparable in size to Earth, and three of which were found to orbit within the star’s habitable zone. And now, a team of international astronomers has announced the discovery of an extra-solar body that is similar to another terrestrial planet in our own Solar System. It’s known as Kepler-1649b, a planet that appears to be similar inRead More →

Astronomy Cast Ep. 444: Fractals For this historic 444th episode of Astronomy Cast, we talk about fractals. Those amazing mathematical visualizations of recursive algorithms. What are they, how do you get them? Why are they important? Visit the Astronomy Cast Page to subscribe to the audio podcast! We usually record Astronomy Cast as a live Google+ Hangout on Air every Friday at 1:30 pm Pacific / 4:30 pm Eastern. You can watch here on Universe Today or from the Astronomy Cast Google+ page. The post Astronomy Cast Ep. 444: Fractals appeared first on Universe Today. Universe Today Go to Source Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Mars’ Trojans Show Remains Of Ancient Planetoid Trojan asteroids are a fascinating thing. Whereas the most widely known are those that orbit Jupiter (around its L4 and L5 Lagrange Points), Venus, Earth, Mars, Uranus and Neptune have populations of these asteroids as well. Naturally, these rocky objects are a focal point for a lot of scientific research, since they can tell us much about the formation and early history of the Solar System. And now, thanks to an international team of astronomers, it has been determined that the Trojan asteroids that orbit Mars are likely the remains of a mini-planet that was destroyed by aRead More →

Surprise: Comet E4 Lovejoy Brightens Comet C/2017 E4 Lovejoy from the morning of Monday, April 3rd, courtesy of Gianluca Masi. Credit and copyright: The Virtual Telescope Project Had your fill of binocular comets yet? Thus far this year, we’ve had periodic comets 2P/Encke, 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková and 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák all reach binocular visibility above +10th magnitude as forecasted. Now, we’d like to point out a surprise interloper in the dawn sky that you’re perhaps not watching, but should be: Comet C/2017 E4 Lovejoy. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because E4 Lovejoy is the sixth discovery by prolific comet hunter Terry Lovejoy. Comets that have shared the LovejoyRead More →

1st Reflown SpaceX Falcon 9 Soars to Orbit with SES-10 Revolutionizing Rocketry Forever – Photo/Video Gallery Worlds 1st ever reflown SpaceX Falcon 9 soars to orbit with SES-10 telecomsat from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:27 p.m. EDT on March 30, 2017. Credit: Ken Kremer/Kenkremer.com KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Billion dollar bet on rocket recycling paid off beautifully when the world’s first ever reflown rocket booster – a SpaceX Falcon 9 – roared off NASA’s historic pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center and successfully delivered the next generation SES-10 TV satellite toRead More →

Deepest X-ray Image Ever Made Contains Mysterious Explosion For over sixty years, astronomers have been exploring the Universe for x-ray sources. Known to be associated with stars, clouds of super heated gas, interstellar mediums, and destructive events, the detection of cosmic x-rays is challenging work. In recent decades, astronomers have been benefited immensely from by the deployment of orbital telescopes like the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Since it was launched on July 23rd, 1999, Chandra has been NASA’s flagship mission for X-ray astronomy. And this past week (on Thurs. March 30th, 2017), the Observatory accomplished something very impressive. Using its suite of advanced instruments, the observatoryRead More →

Space Station Drama After Vital Micrometeorite Shielding Floats Away This past week (on Thurs. March 30th), two crew members of Expedition 50 conducted an important spacewalk on the exterior of the International Space Station. During the seven hours in which they conducted this extravehicular activity (EVA), the astronauts reconnected cables and electrical connections on a new Pressurized Mating Adapter (PMA-3) and installed four new thermal protection shields on the Tranquility module. These shields were required to cover the port that was left exposed when (earlier in the week) the PMA-3 was removed and installed robotically on the Harmony module. In the course of the EVA,Read More →

Four Candidates For Planet 9 Located A concentrated three-day search for a mysterious, unseen planet in the far reaches of our own solar system has yielded four possible candidates. The search for the so-called Planet 9 was part of a real-time search with a Zooniverse citizen science project, in coordination with the BBC’s Stargazing Live broadcast from the Australian National University’s Siding Spring Observatory. A view of data from SAMI, a new multi-object integral field spectrograph at Siding Spring Observatory, which was used to look for the hypothetical Planet 9. Credit: Dilyar Barat via Twitter. Researcher Brad Tucker from ANU, who led the effort, saidRead More →

Weekly Space Hangout – Mar 31, 2017: The IDATA Project and Afterglow Access Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Special Guest: This week’s special guests are Timothy Spuck, Kathryn Meredith, Dr. James Hammerman and Andreas Stefik of the Innovators Developing Accessible Tools for Astronomy (IDATA) Project Team. The IDATA project aims to design and develop Afterglow Access, a new software tool that will expand accessibility beyond touch, making the universe more accessible to those with visual impairments. Tim Spuck (Associated Universities Inc. STEM Education Development Officer and IDATA PI) currently serves as PI on three NSF supported programs including, Innovators Developing Accessible Tools for Astronomy, the Chile-USRead More →

ARCA Unveils the World’s first Single-Stage-to-Orbit Rocket Since the beginning of the Space Age, scientists have relied on multi-stage rockets in order to put spacecraft and payloads into orbit. The same technology has allowed for missions farther into space, sending robotic spacecraft to every planet in the Solar System, and astronauts to the Moon. But looking to the future, it is clear that new ideas will be needed in order to cut costs and expand launch services. Hence why the ARCA Space Corporation has developed a concept for a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) rocket. It’s known as the Haas 2CA, the latest in  a series of rocketsRead More →