A new examination, using Cassini and Huygens data, of nine Titan impact craters at various locations in the equatorial and mid-latitude regions has provided new information on the evolution of the craters, how they are related to Titan’s weather systems, and a unique look at the subsurface composition of the moon exposed due to the impact.
Dragon’s splashdown, which will be controlled by SpaceX teams from Hawthorne, California, is now expected to take place Friday (July 9). The spacecraft will then be transported to NASA’s Space Station Processing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Funk, who was born in 1939, began flying before her 20th birthday. In 1961, she volunteered for a Women in Space program to train privately with a team of medical experts from NASA’s astronaut program. The women went through the same training as men who were in the Mercury 7 program. Funk and 12 other women completed the training, which was called Mercury 13, but their program was canceled before any of the women could officially join NASA.
NASA’s SpaceX Dragon cargo freighter, loaded with approximately 5,000 pounds of scientific experiments and other cargo from the International Space Station, will depart Tuesday, July 6, bound for a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean Thursday, July 8, completing the company’s 22nd commercial resupply services mission for NASA.
Orbital Assembly Corporation is in early stages of building the first orbiting hotel. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2025 while the first guests are hoping to be welcomed by 2027. Who is ready to take a vacation in space?
NASA has been trying to figure out what’s wrong with the Hubble Space Telescope for nearly two weeks, but the mystery just deepened.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) published the footage in a Zhurong mission update early Sunday Beijing time. Video of the descent of the Zhurong rover from its landing platform, including sounds made by the vehicle’s egress, was included in the release.
Liftoff is scheduled for 9:22 p.m. EDT (0122 GMT on Thursday). Here’s how to catch the launch live.
As tensions simmer between Russia and a number of Western countries on the ground, the head of the Russian space agency has announced work has begun on a space station of its own. The International Space Station (ISS) was launched in 1998 by the Russian and US space agencies and has been hailed for its exemplary co-operation involving numerous countries. But Russian officials have indicated they could pull out of the ISS in 2025.
What if the center of our galaxy isn’t a black hole after all? What if it’s a core of dark matter? According to a new and fascinating study, those observed orbits of the galactic center, as well as the orbital velocities in the outer regions of the galaxy, might actually be easier to explain if it was a core of dark matter at the heart of the galaxy, rather than a black hole.
From New Mexico USA to the Edge of Space, the Virgin Galactic Rocket Plane completes first test flight.
For the second time ever, humanity has brought asteroid samples down to Earth. A small capsule bearing pristine pieces of the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu touched down early this afternoon (Dec. 5) within the remote and rugged Woomera Prohibited Area, about 310 miles (500 kilometers) northwest of the South Australian capital of Adelaide. The samples were snagged millions of miles from Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, which studied the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) Ryugu up close from June 2018 to November 2019.
Hayabusa2’s predecessor was the first to haul space-rock samples home, delivering pieces of the stony asteroid Itokawa in 2010. But the original Hayabusa (Japanese for “peregrine falcon”) returned less than 1 milligram of material. Hayabusa2’s bounty is expected to exceed 100 mg (0.0035 ounces), and its samples come from a very different kind of asteroid — a primitive “C-type” space rock rich in water and carbon-containing organic compounds. “The materials that formed the Earth, its oceans and life were present in the primordial cloud from which our solar system formed. In the early solar system, these materials were in contact and able to chemically interact within the same parent objects,” Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) officials wrote in an overview of Hayabusa2. “These interactions are retained even today in primitive bodies (C-type asteroids), so returning samples from these bodies for analysis will elucidate the origins and evolution of the solar system and the building blocks of life,” they added.
