If you ever heard about the ‘Ingenuity’ helicopter then fine, but if you didn’t, then let us tell you that it’s a small helicopter sent by NASA to Mars along with the ‘Perseverance’ rover. Though its main purpose was to just test the idea of ‘helicopter working on Mars’, unexpectedly it performed so well in all areas that NASA considers replacing rovers with helicopters in the next Mars missions.
Grab your binoculars: A comet that has fascinated scientists for five years approaches its closest distance from Earth this week—and you might be able to catch a glimpse. There’s a chance of spotting the C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS comet, also called K2, on Thursday as it makes its final pass through the solar system, said David Jewitt, an Earth, planetary, and space sciences professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
China on Sunday launched three astronauts into space as a part of its mission to complete assembly work on its permanent orbiting space station. The ‘Shenzhou 14’ crew blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert at 10:44 a.m. (02:44 p.m. CST). The three astronauts will spend the next six months on China’s Tiangong space station, which translates to “heavenly palace.”
Neptune and Uranus have much in common — they have similar masses, sizes, and atmospheric compositions — yet their appearances are in different shades of blue. At visible wavelengths, Neptune is a rich, deep azure hue, while Uranus is a distinctly pale shade of cyan. Astronomers now have an explanation for why the two planets are of different colors.
NASA scientists have cut down a year of Perseverance’s audio recordings on the Martian surface to a five-hour playlist of the Red Planet’s best hits (you can listen to some here). The sounds are eerily quiet and offer a new way of exploring the Martian environment. They’ve already helped confirm some theories about the way sounds travel on the planet.
