Great Space

2022-02-22 23:43:55 China casts doubt on origin of rocket debris about to slam into the Moon

China claims that a piece of distant space debris that’s about to slam into the Moon does not stem from one of the nation’s lunar missions, as astronomers tracking the object believe. However, it’s possible that China may have mixed up which mission the debris originally came from, as most evidence points to it being an old Chinese rocket.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-20 16:03:27 Making spaceflight history: John Glenn orbited Earth 60 years ago today

On Feb. 20, 1962, NASA astronaut John Glenn launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral inside a tiny capsule named Friendship 7. The Mercury spacecraft circled Earth three times, ultimately splashing down near the Turks and Caicos Islands four hours and 55 minutes after liftoff.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-17 23:25:02 Astronomers discover massive radio galaxy 100 times larger than the Milky Way

Astronomers have discovered the largest radio galaxy ever, stretching at least 16 million light-years through space, new research shows. The galaxy — named Alcyoneus after the son of Ouranos, the Greek primordial god of the sky — was discovered about 3 billion light-years from Earth by a "stroke of luck," according to a statement from Leiden University in the Netherlands.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-16 21:12:54 Billionaire Jared Isaacman talks origin of Polaris Program and how it could impact spaceflight

Billionaire and private astronaut Jared Isaacman announced his plans to fly to space again on another SpaceX mission. His next flight, targeting the end of the year, will take him even deeper in space than his last flight with the company. It will also be the first in a series of three human spaceflight missions he’s funding with SpaceX, called the Polaris Program.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-13 22:56:31 Photons Received: Webb Sees Its First Star – 18 Times

The James Webb Space Telescope is nearing completion of the first phase of the months-long process of aligning the observatory’s primary mirror using the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-09 21:59:58 A geomagnetic storm may have effectively destroyed 40 SpaceX Starlink satellites

Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink just got dealt an expensive blow — the company’s currently estimating that 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched on February 3rd will be destroyed because of a geomagnetic storm.

The storm caused “up to 50 percent higher drag than during previous launches,” keeping the deployed satellites from reaching their proper orbit around the Earth. And while Starlink tried to fly them “edge-on (like a sheet of paper)” to reduce that drag, it now looks like as many as 40 of them will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere instead of reaching their destinations.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-07 19:19:15 Astronomers may have for the first time detected and measured the mass of an isolated stellar-mass black hole, a new study finds.

Previous research suggested that when giant stars more than 20 times the mass reach the end of their lives, they usually die in catastrophic explosions known as supernovas, and their dense cores are expected to collapse to become black holes.

Stars big enough to create black holes are estimated to make up about one out of a thousand stars, suggesting that in the Milky Way, "there should be about 100 million stellar-mass black holes," study lead author Kailash Sahu, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, told Space.com.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-06 20:34:56 NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is cooling down for its next trick: Observing the universe

"The telescope is cold ... the instruments are cooling," John Mather, a Nobel laureate and astrophysicist who also works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Webb needs to be very cold for its infrared instruments to pick up subtleties in galaxies, exoplanets and other objects it is examining, and Mather said individual photons (particles of light) are starting to register in the telescope's detectors. "No images to show you yet," he said, "but it will be soon, I hope."

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-04 14:04:08 New company run by former NASA leader aims to build robotic outpost near the Moon

A new startup run by a former acting NASA administrator hopes to capitalize on the recent zeal for lunar space exploration by building robotic outposts and spacecraft to send to space near the Moon. Their goal is to create a fleet of robotic helpers that can do a variety of tasks near the Moon, such as providing internet capabilities, collecting data, refueling spacecraft, and assembling structures in lunar space.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment

2022-02-01 18:14:47 COSMO-SKYMED SECOND GENERATION FM2 MISSION

On Monday, January 31 at 6:11 p.m. EST, Falcon 9 launched the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM2 mission to low Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

This was the third launch and landing of this booster, which previously supported the launch of Arabsat-6A and STP-2.

More news on Great Space Open / Comment