Venus is about to get double the extra attention. NASA’s Solar Orbiter, in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), will hone in on Venus on Aug. 9, but it won’t be alone for long. Another ESA spacecraft, BepiColombo (a partnership with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA) will fly by the planet just one day later.
Virgin Galactic, buoyed by a successful July 11 suborbital test flight with founder Richard Branson on the company’s winged rocket plane, re-opened ticket sales Thursday for rides to space starting at $450,000 per seat.
Planet announced a multiyear agreement Aug. 5 that designates SpaceX as the Earth-observation company’s “go-to-launch provider through the end of 2025.”
The Perseid meteor shower occurs every year from around mid-July to late August, as Earth passes through a cloud of dust particles and debris from a comet known as 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which was discovered in 1862.
A German-built space telescope is creating the most detailed map of black holes and neutron stars across our universe, revealing more than 3 million newfound objects in less than two years.
When the titans of space — galaxy clusters — collide, extraordinary things can happen. A new study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory examines the repercussions after two galaxy clusters clashed.
A Russian Proton-M rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 10:58 a.m. Eastern carrying the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, or Nauka. The module separated from the rocket’s upper stage about nine and a half minutes after launch. Both Roscosmos and NASA said that Nauka deployed its solar arrays and navigational antennas shortly after separation.
Arecibo Observatory’s massive radio dish was many things to many people: pulsar finder, broadcaster to aliens, asteroid mapper, Bond villain’s hidden satellite dish, Puerto Rican icon, birthplace of future scientists. Until seven months ago, that is, when gravity got the best of an engineering marvel that had endured everything thrown its way for decades and the entire platform crashed down.
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.