News (Page 871)

Air Force’s Secret X-37B Space Plane Lands After 718 Days in Orbit The Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane landed at the Kennedy Space Center’s orbiter runway on Sunday, May 7, after spending a record 718 days in orbit. This was the fourth flight of the uncrewed, autonomous military project, and was the first landing for an X-37B at KSC. “The landing of OTV-4 marks another success for the X-37B program and the nation,” said Lt. Col. Ron Fehlen, X-37B program manager. “This mission once again set an on-orbit endurance record and marks the vehicle’s first landing in the state of Florida. We are incrediblyRead More →

Does Jupiter Have a Solid Core? The gas giants have always been a mystery to us. Due their dense and swirling clouds, it is impossible to get a good look inside them and determine their true structure. Given their distance from Earth, it is time-consuming and expensive to send spacecraft to them, making survey missions few and far between. And due to their intense radiation and strong gravity, any mission that attempts to study them has to be do so carefully. And yet, scientists have been for decades that this massive gas giant has a solid core. This is consistent with our current theories ofRead More →

Only 10 Light-Years Away, there’s a Baby Version of the Solar System Astronomers are understandanly fascinated with the Epsilon Eridani system. For one, this star system is in close proximity to our own, at a distance of about 10.5 light years from the Solar System. Second, it has been known for some time that it contains two asteroid belts and a large debris disk. And third, astronomers have suspected for many years that this star may also have a system of planets. On top of all that, a new study by a team of astronomers has indicated that Epsilon Eridani may be what our ownRead More →

SpaceX Blasts First Surveillance Satellite to Orbit – Launch and Landing Photo/Video Gallery SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying classified NROL-76 surveillance satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office successfully launches shortly after sunrise from Launch Complex 39A on 1 May 2017 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 1st stage accomplished successful ground landing at the Cape nine minutes later. Credit: Ken Kremer/Kenkremer.com KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL – This week SpaceX blasted their first top secret surveillance satellite to orbit for America’s spy chiefs at National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) affording magnificent viewing and imagery from the Florida Space Coast. Liftoff of the classified NROL-76 payload forRead More →

Faster Supercomputer! NASA Announces the High Performance Fast Computing Challenge For decades, NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) has been responsible for developing the technologies that put satellites into orbit, astronauts on the Moon, and sent robotic missions to other planets. Unfortunately, after many years of supporting NASA missions, some of their machinery is getting on in years and is in need of an upgrade. Consider the Pleiades supercomputer, the distributed-memory machine that is responsible for conducting modeling and simulations for NASA missions. Despite being one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, Pleiades will need to be upgraded in order to stay up toRead More →

High-Speed Space Broadband for Everyone. SpaceX Details their Plans to Launch 1000s of Internet Satellites SpaeeX and Tesla-founder Elon Musk has made some rather bold promises over the years. In addition to building a fleet of reusable rockets, an Interplanetary Transport System, colonizing Mars, and revolutionizing transportation, he has also made it clear that he hopes to provide worldwide broadband access by deploying a “constellation” of internet-providing satellites. In November of 2016, SpaceX filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a license to operate this constellation of non-geostationary satellites (NGS). And earlier this week, the US Senate Committee on Commerce. Science, andRead More →

A Single Wave, Bigger Than the Milky Way, is Rolling Through the Perseus Galaxy Cluster NASA has discovered a wave of hot gas larger than the Milky Way rolling through the Perseus galaxy cluster. This X-ray image is the result of 16 days of observing with the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The image was filtered to make details easier to see. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Stephen Walker et al. An international team of scientists has discovered an enormous wave of hot gas rolling its way through the Perseus galaxy cluster. The wave is a giant version of what’s called a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave. They’re created whenRead More →

Weekly Space Hangout – May 5, 2017: Mathew Anderson’s “Our Cosmic Story,” Updated! Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain) Special Guest: The WSH again welcomes Mathew Anderson, author of “Our Cosmic Story,” to the show. You may recall that Mathew joined us last fall just prior to the release of “Our Cosmic Story,” and he was kind enough to offer our viewers free electronic copies just for the asking. Since then, Mathew has expanded the last chapter of his book to include additional information about SETI, and with the recent exoplanet discoveries, many of the other chapters are of even greater relevance. We are pleased to announceRead More →

The Cetus Constellation Welcome back to Constellation Friday! Today, in honor of the late and great Tammy Plotner, we will be dealing with the sea monster – the Cetus constellation! In the 2nd century CE, Greek-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus (aka. Ptolemy) compiled a list of all the then-known 48 constellations. This treatise, known as the Almagest, would used by medieval European and Islamic scholars for over a thousand years to come, effectively becoming astrological and astronomical canon until the early Modern Age. One of these constellations is Cetus, which was named in honor of the sea monster from Greek mythology.  Cetus is the fourth largestRead More →

Titan Ripe For Drone Invasion With its dense and hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere, Titan has been a subject of interest for many decades. And with the success of the Cassini-Huygens mission, which began exploring Saturn and its system of moons back in 2004, there are many proposals on the table for follow-up missions that would explore the surface of Titan and its methane seas in greater depth. The challenges that this presents have led to some rather novel ideas, ranging from balloons and landers to floating drones and submarines. But it is the proposal for a “Dragonfly” drone by researchers at NASA’s JHUAPL that seems  particularly adventurous.Read More →

New Japanese mission will be going to the Moons of Mars In the coming decades, the world’s largest space agencies hope to mount some exciting missions to the Moon and to Mars. Between NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency (ESA), the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), there is simply no shortage of proposals for Lunar bases, crewed missions to Mars, and robotic explorers to both. However, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has a different mission in mind when it comes to the coming decades. Instead of exploring the Moon or Mars, they propose exploring the moons ofRead More →

Enjoy The Biggest Infrared Image Ever Taken Of The Small Magellanic Cloud Without All That Pesky Dust In The Way The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) galaxy. Credit: ESA/VISTA The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way’s nearest companions (along with the Large Magellanic Cloud.) It’s visible with the naked eye in the southern hemisphere. A new image from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) has peered through the clouds that obscure it and given us our biggest image ever of the dwarf galaxy. The SMC contains several hundred million stars, is about 7,000 light yearsRead More →

Building Rovers That Can Detect Life and Sequence DNA on Other Worlds In 2015, then-NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan stated that, “I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definite evidence in the next 10 to 20 years.” With multiple missions scheduled to search foe evidence of life (past and present) on Mars and in the outer Solar System, this hardly seems like an unrealistic appraisal. But of course, finding evidence of life is no easy task. In addition to concerns over contamination, there is also the and the hazards the comes with operating inRead More →

Why Do Rockets Need Stages? The Quest to Build a Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Now, don’t get me wrong, Science Fiction is awesome. Like almost everyone working in the field of space and astronomy, I was deeply influenced by science fiction. For me, it was Star Trek and Star Wars. I had a toy phaser that made this awesome really loud phaser sound, and I played with it non-stop until it disappeared one day. And I was sure I’d left it in the middle of my floor, like I did with all my toys, but I found it a few years later, hidden upRead More →

Comet Halley Plays Bit Part In Weekend Eta Aquarid Meteor Shower Watch for the Eta Aquarid shower this week, so called because meteors will appear to radiate from near the star Eta Aquarii.  The meteors originate from fragments of Halley’s Comet strewn about its orbit. Every May, Earth crosses the stream and we get a meteor shower. At maximum on Saturday morning May 6, 25-30 meteors per hour might be seen from the right location under dark skies. Map: Bob King, Source: Stellarium Halley’s Comet may be at the far end of its orbit 3.2 billion miles (5.1 billion km) from Earth, but this week fragments ofRead More →

Where Should We Look For Ancient Civilizations in the Solar System? The search for life in the Universe takes many paths. There’s SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which is searching for signals from a distant ancient civilization. There’s the exploration of our own Solar System, on Mars, or underneath the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus, to see if life can be anywhere there’s liquid water and a source of energy. And upcoming space telescopes like James Webb will attempt to directly image the atmospheres of distant extrasolar planets, to see if they contain the distinct chemical signatures of life. But according toRead More →

Rise Of The Super Telescopes: The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope We humans have an insatiable hunger to understand the Universe. As Carl Sagan said, “Understanding is Ecstasy.” But to understand the Universe, we need better and better ways to observe it. And that means one thing: big, huge, enormous telescopes. In this series we’ll look at the world’s upcoming Super Telescopes: The Giant Magellan Telescope The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope The 30 Meter Telescope The European Extremely Large Telescope The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope The James Webb Space Telescope The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) It’s easy toRead More →

Carnival of Space #507 Welcome, come in to the 507th Carnival of Space! The Carnival is a community of space science and astronomy writers and bloggers, who submit their best work each week for your benefit. I’m Susie Murph, part of the team at Universe Today and CosmoQuest. So now, on to this week’s stories! Over at Planetaria, Paul Scott Anderson reports on New findings from two ‘ocean moons’ increase possibility of finding alien life. Cassini and the Hubble Space Telescope have dramatically increased our odds in this endeavor. Paul also reports on how four of the Trappist worlds may genuinely be covered in water,Read More →

NASA’s Space Chainmail to Give Astronauts the Edge in Space Duels One would think NASA was preparing for a some sword fights in space! At least, that’s the impression one might get when they see the new armor NASA is developing for the first time. Officially, they are referring to it as a new type of “space fabric“, one which will provide protection to astronauts, spaceships and deployable devices. But to the casual observer, it looks a lot like chain mail armor! The new armor is the brainchild of Polit Casillas, a systems engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Inspired by traditional textiles, this armorRead More →