Juno’s flyby portrait of Earth
This false color composite shows more than half of Earth’s disk over the coast of Argentina, South America and the South Atlantic Ocean as NASA’s Juno probe slingshotted by on Oct. 9, 2013 for a gravity assisted acceleration to Jupiter. The mosaic was assembled from raw images taken by the Junocam imager. Juno will arrive …
United Launch Alliance celebrates 75th successful launch
An Atlas V rocket carrying the Advanced Extremely High Frequency-3 (AEHF-3) satellite for the United States Air Force lifted off from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida early in the morning of Sept. 18. It was United Launch Alliance’s ninth launch of an ambitious 12 mission schedule for the year. …
Cassini images Earth beneath Saturn’s rings
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away on July 19. Meanwhile, MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a …
LADEE on mission to study Moon’s thin atmosphere
Did you know the Moon has an atmosphere? I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t. Until just a few years ago nobody did. It’s not much. You can’t breathe it. We think it’s mostly dust. But we don’t know exactly what’s in it or how it works. How does an atmosphere operate when the days are 28 …
Into the unknown! Interstellar adventure begins for Voyager 1
The hotly contested question has been answered: Voyager 1 is humanity’s first object to enter interstellar space! The historic announcement came from NASA after a year of review into 2012 and 2013 data points from the intrepid probe. Officially, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space on 25 August 2012. The debate For over a year, scientists …
Radio bursts discovered from beyond our galaxy
Astronomers, including a team member from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have detected the first population of radio bursts known to originate from galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. The sources of the light bursts are unknown, but cataclysmic events, such as merging or exploding stars, are likely the triggers. A radio burst …
Lockheed Martin supplying advanced GPS, secure communication satellites
One half of the formula was Glenn L. Martin. Motivated by flight legend Orville Wright to bring his groundbreaking idea for a new aircraft design to life, he found a church and used it as a garage to build his creation. Destiny started brewing four months later, when brothers Allan and Malcolm Lockheed created Alco-Hydro …
What would we want to know if we landed on Jupiter’s Europa?
Most of what scientists know of Jupiter’s moon Europa they have gleaned from a dozen or so close flybys from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1979 and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1990s. Even in these fleeting, paparazzi-like encounters, scientists have seen a fractured, ice-covered world with tantalizing signs of a liquid water ocean …
Being a cosmonaut was ‘just a job’ for history-making Helen Sharman
The following article is an account of several meetings, chats and short interviews I have had with the first Briton in space, Helen P. Sharman I first met Helen over 15 years ago at the University of Sheffield when I attended a lecture organised by the University of Sheffield’s Chemistry Society at which she told …
Cold brown dwarfs blur line between stars and planets
In 2011, astronomers on the hunt for the coldest star-like celestial bodies discovered a new class of such objects using NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope. But until now, no one knew exactly how cool the bodies’ surfaces really are. In fact, some evidence suggested they could be at room temperature. A new …