Space & Astronomy News

Credit: NASA, ESA/Andreas Mogensen This high exposure photograph revealed Earth’s atmospheric glow against the backdrop of a starry sky in this image taken from the International Space Station on Jan. 21, 2024. At the time, the orbital lab was 258 miles above the Pacific Ocean northeast of Papua New Guinea. …

NASA’s Europa Clipper, with all of its instruments installed, is visible in the clean room of High Bay 1 at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Jan. 19. The tent around the spacecraft was erected to support electromagnetic testing. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech With less than nine months remaining in the countdown …

It is difficult to emphasize the significance of the milestone surpassed by Nasa’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity. The little (1.8kg) helicopter touched down with the Perseverance rover in 2021. On 25 January 2024, Nasa announced that the flying vehicle had to perform an emergency landing which damaged one of its rotors …

Space Shuttle Endeavour is lifted into the site of the future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center on Monday, Jan. 29, 2024, in Los Angeles. Credit: AP Photo/Ashley Landis NASA’s retired Space Shuttle Endeavour was carefully hoisted late Monday to be mated to a huge external fuel tank and its …

We select 10 and 5 candidate planets around nearby stars for ELT/HARMONI and ELT/METIS, respectively. As the spatial resolution of ELT/HARMONI is smaller than the plotting range, we only show the spatial resolution for ELT/METIS as the vertical dotted blue line. Planets located to the right of the dotted line …

Researchers at Fraunhofer IOF have developed and manufactured a high-precision silicon-based double slit for the spectrometer on board ESA’s FLEX satellite Credit: Fraunhofer IOF ESA plans to launch its FLEX mission in 2025. The aim is to collect data on the Earth’s vegetation from space. For the spectrometer on board …

Some of the vortices identified by Jovian Vortex Hunter volunteers. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Sankar The Jovian Vortex Hunter project, launched on Zooniverse in June 2022, is out of data as of December 23, 2023. Over 6,000 registered volunteers joined the project to view images from NASA’s JunoCam instrument of the swirling clouds in …

MIT scientists have identified 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs)—extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. The detections more than double the number of known TDEs in the nearby universe. Credit: Megan Masterson, Erin Kara, et al. Star-shredding black holes …

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavour will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday night, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone. Plans for the coming move—setting into place the crown jewel of the new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center—have been in the …

The trajectory for NASA’s Lucy spacecraft as seen from a perspective looking down on the solar system. The sun (yellow circle), orbits of Earth (blue) and Jupiter (orange), as well as the position of Jupiter mid-way through Lucy’s tour (orange circle) and approximate locations of the small body populations (gray) …