Great Space

2022-05-26 17:03:59 NASA, Boeing Complete Starliner Uncrewed Flight Test to Space Station

NASA and Boeing safely landed the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft Wednesday in the desert of the western United States, completing the uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) to the International Space Station to help prove the system is ready to fly astronauts.

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2022-05-24 19:25:52 Massive Mars dust storms triggered by heat imbalances, scientists find

Mars' planet-engulfing dust storms are being driven by a dramatic energy imbalance between seasons and even between day and night on the Red Planet, new research has found. "One of the most interesting findings is that energy excess — more energy being absorbed than produced — could be one of the generating mechanisms of dust storms on Mars," said Ellen Creecy in a statement. Creecy is a doctoral student at the University of Houston and lead author of the new research.

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2022-05-22 19:14:31 Boeing’s Starliner successfully docks to the International Space Station for the first time

Boeing’s new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, successfully docked itself to the International Space Station — demonstrating that the vehicle can potentially bring humans to the ISS in the future. It’s a crucial capability that Starliner has finally validated in space after years of delays and failures.

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2022-05-20 19:44:13 Hubble Reaches New Milestone in Mystery of Universe's Expansion Rate

Completing a nearly 30-year marathon, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has calibrated more than 40 "milepost markers" of space and time to help scientists precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe – a quest with a plot twist.

This collection of 36 images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope features galaxies that are all hosts to both Cepheid variables and supernovae. These two celestial phenomena are both crucial tools used by astronomers to determine astronomical distance, and have been used to refine our measurement of the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe

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2022-05-18 17:12:01 NASA’s InSight Still Hunting Marsquakes as Power Levels Diminish

NASA’s InSight Mars lander is gradually losing power and is anticipated to end science operations later this summer. By December, InSight’s team expects the lander to have become inoperative, concluding a mission that has thus far detected more than 1,300 marsquakes – most recently, a magnitude 5 that occurred on May 4 – and located quake-prone regions of the Red Planet.

The information gathered from those quakes has allowed scientists to measure the depth and composition of Mars’ crust, mantle, and core. Additionally, InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) has recorded invaluable weather data and studied remnants of Mars’ ancient magnetic field.

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2022-05-16 19:12:58 Sagittarius A: NASA Telescopes Support Event Horizon Telescope in Studying Milky Way's Black Hole

The main panel of this graphic contains X-ray data from Chandra (blue) depicting hot gas that was blown away from massive stars near the black hole. Two images of infrared light at different wavelengths from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show stars (orange) and cool gas (purple). These images are seven light years across at the distance of Sgr A. A pull-out shows the new EHT image, which is only about 1.8 x 10-5 light years across (0.000018 light years, or about 10 light minutes).

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2022-05-14 20:51:45 Starlink is now available in 32 countries around the world.

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2022-05-14 00:01:04 This is the first picture of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way
The center of our galactic home

The world has been gifted the second photograph ever taken of a supermassive black hole — and this time, it’s a black hole that’s relatively close to home. Today, scientists collaborating on the massive Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project released an image of Sagittarius A*, the gargantuan black hole spinning away at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

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2022-05-11 19:39:25 NASA’s InSight lander detects largest ‘marsquake’ yet on Red Planet
The detection comes as InSight slowly gathers dust

NASA’s beleaguered InSight lander on Mars has detected a magnitude 5 “marsquake” — the largest one the spacecraft has felt yet since landing on the planet in November of 2018. It’s a major moment that comes during a fraught time for InSight, as the spacecraft’s solar panels continue to gather dust that will eventually bring an end to the vehicle’s life on Mars.

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2022-05-08 23:46:48 See the fiery Blood Moon rise in a total lunar eclipse in May's must-see skywatching event

On the night of May 15-16, the attention of millions of people will be drawn skyward, where a mottled, coppery globe — the moon — will be completely immersed in the long, tapering cone of shadow cast into space by our planet. If the weather is clear, skywatchers across most of the Americas, Europe and Africa will have a view of one of nature's most beautiful spectacles: a total eclipse of the moon.

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