Tag Archives: space

Before humans sent the first dogs and chimps into space, there was genuine fear: Can a living creature evolved for gravity survive in sustained zero-G? Many posited that the result would be fatal, as gas bubbles formed in the veins or stomach acid rose to eat the body from within. …

The latest mission out of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) will examine not one, but two space bodies. After Tianwen-2 launches Wednesday afternoon, it will rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, then send samples to Earth before setting out to meet with a distant comet.If all goes according to plan, …

Scientists are scratching their heads after taking a closer look at 2MASX J23453268−0449256, a spiral galaxy with a mouthful of a name. Nearly 1 billion light-years from Earth, the galaxy contains something it shouldn’t: a supermassive black hole with jets so powerful, the spiral should no longer be stable.J2345-0449—as the …

Engineering students at the University of Southern California (USC) have dramatically surpassed a 20-year-old world record for the highest altitude reached by an amateur rocket. Called Aftershock II, the suborbital spacecraft reached 470,000 feet in October, smashing the previous record by a whopping 90,000 feet.Aftershock II comes from the Rocket …

As the name implies, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was designed to spot exoplanets, but it’s flexible. A team of professional and amateur astronomers have used the planet hunter to identify an unusual triple star system known as TIC 290061484. The remarkably close orbit of these celestial objects produced …

Researchers in Japan have finished building the world’s first wooden satellite. Called LignoSat—a reference to lignin, wood’s chief organic polymer—the satellite represents a potential solution to the space industry’s growing debris problem.Space junk is such a pervasive problem that it’s becoming more space junk and tricking people into believing they’ve …

Artist’s rendering of a Solsys system that mechanically sorts regolith before dissolving nutrients into water. (Image: Solsys/ESA)The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Wednesday that it’s launched a new project that will help determine the feasibility of farming on the moon. The project, “Enabling Lunar In-Situ Agriculture by Producing Fertilizer from …

Not long ago, an enormous telescope hovering beyond the moon and peering back to the dawn of the universe would have been science fiction, but the James Webb Space Telescope is out there today doing very real science. The next big advancement in space science has to start somewhere, and …

The James Webb Space Telescope was not designed exclusively to hunt for exoplanets like NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), but it can still make vital contributions to our understanding of these distant worlds. NASA has announced that Webb just confirmed its first exoplanet, a world known as LHS 475 …

Digital imaging technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. You can buy a smartphone that fits in your pocket with a whopping 200MP of camera resolution, but sometimes you just have to go big. Engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California are putting …