Great Space

2021-10-18 22:48:56 At first glance, Seyfert's Sextet looks like six galaxies grouped closely together in this Hubble image.

However, the small spiral galaxy (right of center) is much farther away than the others, and a bright clump to the lower right is material torn from one of the other galaxies.

Astronomers named the grouping after astronomer Carl Seyfert, who discovered the assemblage in the late 1940s.

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2021-10-16 18:31:41 NASA launches its Lucy spacecraft to study the Jupiter Trojan asteroids
The craft took off from Cape Canaveral early Saturday morning for a 12-year mission

NASA’s Lucy space probe launched successfully from Cape Canaveral in Florida early Saturday, the beginning of a 12-year mission to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.

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2021-10-14 19:38:16 Blue Origin successfully sends William Shatner and crew to edge of space and back

Famed Star Trek actor William Shatner and a crew of three fellow passengers successfully flew to the edge of space and back this morning on Blue Origin’s New Shepard tourist rocket. The foursome took off from Blue Origin’s launch facility in Van Horn, Texas at 9:50AM ET, climbed to an altitude of roughly 66 miles up, and then safely landed back on Earth.

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2021-10-12 21:09:31 The Small Magellanic Cloud, located 210,000 light-years away, is one of the most brilliant and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space. The center of the brilliant star cluster seen in this image contains dozens of hot, blue, high-mass stars. Radiation reaches out to create the surrounding swirls of dust and gas.

The cluster at the center of this image contains more than half of the known high-mass stars in the entire Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy!

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2021-10-10 19:38:49 Boeing Starliner test flight delayed until 2022
The spacecraft has been plagued by technical problems

NASA has officially pushed back the launch of its Orbital Flight-Test 2 until next year, as it continues to work on an oxidizer isolation valve issue on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, the agency announced.

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2021-10-09 13:22:42 Hubble Detects a Dangerous Dance

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features two interacting galaxies that are so intertwined, they have a collective name – Arp 91.

NASA Image of the Day
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2021-10-06 12:25:35 Russia launches movie actress and producer to space for cosmic film shoot
They’ll spend 12 days in orbit filming scenes for The Challenge

Early this morning, a trio of Russians launched to the International Space Station on a Soyuz spacecraft, but two of these fliers were no ordinary cosmonauts. Included in the crew was a Russian actress named Yulia Peresild and a film producer named Klim Shipenko, who have just docked at the station to film scenes for an upcoming movie. With their arrival, they’re the first multiperson film crew to visit the ISS.

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2021-10-04 16:00:33 Remembering the Gallaudet Eleven and Their Contributions to Spaceflight

Harold Domich. Robert Greenmun. Barron Gulak. Raymond Harper. Jerald Jordan. Harry Larson. David Myers. Donald Peterson. Raymond Piper. Alvin Steele. John Zakutney.

Before NASA could send humans to space, the agency needed to better understand the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body. So, in the late 1950s, NASA and the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine established a joint research program to study these effects and recruited 11 deaf men aged 25-48 from Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University). Today, these men are known to history as the “Gallaudet Eleven."

In this image, the study participants chat in the zero-g aircraft that flew out of Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla.

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2021-10-01 16:58:39 Honda is doubling down on rockets, robots, and flying cars
The automaker will spend $45 billion on R&D over the next six years

Honda is hoping to put its work propulsion, guidance, and control technologies to work on a “reusable rocket” program, said Marcos Frommer, head of corporate communications for Honda, in a briefing with reporters. The automaker started developing rocket technology in 2019, he added. “If we can use such rockets to launch small low orbit satellites, we can expect to evolve our core technologies into various services, including connected services,” he said.

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2021-09-29 15:45:39 NASA’s Lucy Mission Prepares for Launch to Trojan Asteroids

NASA has tested the functions of Lucy, the agency’s first spacecraft to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, filled it with fuel, and is preparing to pack it into a capsule for launch Saturday, Oct. 16.

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