China might be contemplating a “takeover” of the Moon as part of its military space program and Chinese astronauts are busy learning how to destroy other nations’ satellites, NASA chief Bill Nelson claimed. In 2035, he said that Beijing could have its Moon station completed and be able to begin experimentation a year later.
NASA’s CAPSTONE mission, which will chart a new orbit around the moon that will hopefully be used for a future crewed lunar space station, is underway after a successful launch on Tuesday morning. Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle delivered the CAPSTONE satellite, which is roughly the size of a large microwave oven, to Earth orbit for step one of its lunar journey.
Very soon, humanity will get to view the deepest images of the universe that have ever been captured. In two weeks, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — NASA’s super expensive, super-powerful deep-space optical imager — will release its first full-color images, and agency officials today suggested that they could just be the beginning.
You know you’re living in the space age when a rocket hits the moon, and the industry as a whole points to the sky and, like an angry teacher holding up a paper airplane, asks “Who launched this?!” Truly, that is what occurred this week as an unidentified rocket stage (!) impacted the lunar surface, forming a new and interesting crater and leaving us all wondering how it’s possible to not know what happened.
With Space X mission of launching rockets more than 60 times in 2022 and conducting three launches within 36 hours span last week, China is also continuing its quest to carry out more than 50 orbital launches this year with a pair of missions lifting off within just over 24 hours of each other.
They don’t call Jupiter “King of Planets” for nothing. It’s massive, really heavy, and now scientists think it ate chunks of other planets to get as big as it is.
That’s right, the gas giant named after Greek and Roman gods is thought to have absorbed a series of small “planetesimals” en route to claiming its place as the biggest planet in the solar system.
China’s Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission.
An enormous sunspot called AR3038, that has been doubling in size each day for the past three days is now facing Earth—meaning it could send a solar flare our way. Solar flares can disrupt radio communications and power grids on Earth.
Elon Musk’s space company, ‘SpaceX’, has back-to-back-to-back orbital missions lined up on Friday and Sunday. It just hauled a Globalstar communications satellite into orbit early Sunday from Cape Canaveral, pulling off the third Falcon 9 rocket flight in just 36 hours, the fastest sequence of three missions by any commercial launch company in history.
Mars might be 300 million miles away, but it’s not immune from the trash. While not a single human being inhabits Mars, there’s already at least one piece of litter dotting the Red Planet according to the Twitter account for NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover. Reportedly, NASA’s rover spotted an unexpected piece of trash on the red planet in the form of a shiny object wedged between two pieces of rock.
Black holes are the gluttons of the cosmos, devouring everything that veers too close — including light itself. Now, an international team of researchers says they have discovered a supermassive black hole that gobbles up the equivalent of one Earth every second.
The most powerful telescope ever launched into space was recently damaged by a small space rock hurtling through the solar system. NASA made the announcement on Wednesday, June 8, stating that the collision with the James Webb Space Telescope occurred between May 23 and May 25, adding that micrometeoroid strikes such as this are “unavoidable.”
