Space

The rising Earth is about five degrees above the lunar horizon in this telephoto view taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft near 110 degrees east longitude. Astronaut Bill Anders took the photo on the morning of Dec. 24, 1968. The South Pole is in the white area near the left end of the terminator. North and South America are under the clouds.

Image Credit: NASA

https://www.nasa.gov/image-detail/as08-14-2383orig/

Just end it already.

More seriously, odds to hit are low, the effects would be local to the impact site, and we should have a good idea of where it will come down long before impact if it does hit. The potential impact sites are in Northern South America, North Africa, the Middle East, and India.

[Image Description: A close-in image of a protoplanetary disc around a newly formed star. Many different wavelengths of light are combined and represented by separate and various colours. A dark line across the centre is the disc, corresponding to the densest parts of the disc, made of opaque dust: the star is hidden in here and creates a strong glow in the centre. A band going straight up is a jet, while other outflows above and below the disc, and a tail coming off to one side.]

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2501a/

NASA awarded new study contracts Thursday to help support life and work on the lunar surface. As part of the agency’s blueprint for deep space exploration to support the Artemis campaign, nine American companies in seven states are receiving awards.

The Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships Appendix R contracts will advance learning in managing everyday challenges in the lunar environment identified in the agency’s Moon to Mars architecture.

“These contract awards are the catalyst for developing critical capabilities for the Artemis missions and the everyday needs of astronauts for long-term exploration on the lunar surface,” said Nujoud Merancy, deputy associate administrator, Strategy and Architecture Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The strong response to our request for proposals is a testament to the interest in human exploration and the growing deep-space economy. This is an important step to a sustainable return to the Moon that, along with our commercial partners, will lead to innovation and expand our knowledge for future lunar missions, looking toward Mars.”

The selected proposals have a combined value of $24 million, spread across multiple companies, and propose innovative strategies and concepts for logistics and mobility solutions including advanced robotics and autonomous capabilities:

Blue Origin, Merritt Island, Florida – logistical carriers; logistics handling and offloading; logistics transfer; staging, storage, and tracking; surface cargo and mobility; and integrated strategies Intuitive Machines, Houston, Texas – logistics handling and offloading; and surface cargo and mobility

Leidos, Reston, Virginia – logistical carriers; logistics transfer; staging, storage, and tracking; trash management; and integrated strategies

Lockheed Martin, Littleton, Colorado – logistical carriers; logistics transfer; and surface cargo and mobility

MDA Space, Houston – surface cargo and mobility

Moonprint, Dover, Delaware – logistical carriers

Pratt Miller Defense, New Hudson, Michigan – surface cargo and mobility

Sierra Space, Louisville, Colorado – logistical carriers; logistics transfer; staging, storage, and tracking; trash management; and integrated strategies

Special Aerospace Services, Huntsville, Alabama – logistical carriers; logistics handling and offloading; logistics transfer; staging, storage, and tracking; trash management; surface cargo and mobility; and integrated strategies

NASA is working with industry, academia, and the international community to continuously evolve the blueprint for crewed exploration and taking a methodical approach to investigating solutions that set humanity on a path to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Tiernan P. Doyle

Ever since the dawn of human consciousness, skywatchers have been mystified by "wandering stars." These are the five visible planets circling our Sun. It was thought they influenced earthly affairs and allowed for future predictions through the pseudoscience of astrology. But real astronomers asked: where did the planets come from?

In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant and Pierre-Simon Laplace hypothesized that the planets condensed out of a disk of dust and gas encircling the newborn Sun. This was based on the observations that the planet's orbits are co-planar, and they all move in the same direction, like a spinning phonograph record. In essence, their orbits are the residual skeleton of the long-vanished disk. But astronomers had to wait 200 years before the first telescopic evidence was collected that supported Kant and Laplace's conjecture. With the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), they found a puzzling excess of infrared light from warm dust around the bright blue star Vega in the summer constellation Lyra. This was interpreted as a disk of planet-forming material. Observations with IRAS discovered that such disks are common around young stars. Vega was the first clue.

Teams of astronomers have now used the combined power of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to revisit the legendary Vega disk. Hubble sees debris the size of smoke particles, and Webb traces roughly sand-grain-sized particles. The big surprise is that there is no obvious evidence for one or more large planets plowing through the disk like snow tractors. This is common around other young stars. However, the Vega disk looks almost as smooth as a pancake, with no signs of planets. Vega is forcing astronomers to rethink the range and variety among planetary systems around other stars. The disk architecture apparently plays out differently around other star systems. Hubble and Webb are showing us that the starry sky is all about unanticipated diversity when it comes to planetary construction yards.

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An astronomer analyzed ancient supermassive black holes with mathematical models and found they likely grew exponentially after light, intermediate, and heavy seed stars merged.

Ever since the Bennu samples returned to Earth on September 24, 2023, we and our colleagues on four continents have spent hundreds of hours studying them.

The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made observations of reflected light that revealed the most abundant minerals and organics when it was near asteroid Bennu. Our analyses in the laboratory found that the compositions of these samples lined up with those observations.

The samples are mostly water-rich clay, with sulfide, carbonate, and iron oxide minerals. These are the same minerals found in CI chondrites like Revelstoke. The discovery of rare minerals within the Bennu samples, however, surprised both of us. Despite our decades of experience studying meteorites, we have never seen many of these minerals.

We found minerals dominated by sodium, including carbonates, sulfates, chlorides, and fluorides, as well as potassium chloride and magnesium phosphate. These minerals don’t form just when water and rock react. They form when water evaporates.

Image and caption: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Engineers and technicians with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program integrate the right forward center segment onto mobile launcher 1 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025. The boosters will help support the remaining rocket components and the Orion spacecraft during final assembly of the Artemis II Moon rocket and provide more than 75 percent of the total SLS (Space Launch System) thrust during liftoff from NASA Kennedy’s Launch Pad 39B

Article: Tiffany L. Fairley

Teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program continue stacking the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket’s twin solid rocket booster motor segments for the agency’s Artemis II mission, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Currently, six of the 10 segments are secured atop mobile launcher 1 with the right forward center segment as the latest addition. Teams will continue integrating the booster stack – the left center center segment adorned with the NASA “worm” insignia is the next segment to be integrated.

The right and left forward assemblies were brought to the VAB from the spaceport’s Booster Fabrication Facility on Jan. 14. The forward assemblies are comprised of three parts: the nose cone which serves as the aerodynamic fairing; a forward skirt, which house avionics; and the frustum which houses motors that separates the boosters from the SLS core stage during flight. The remaining booster segments will be transported from the Rotation, Processing, and Surge Facility to the VAB when engineers are ready to integrate them. The forward assemblies will be the last segments integrated to complete the booster configuration, ahead of integration with the core stage.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams is seen outside the International Space Station during the Jan. 16, 2025, spacewalk where she and fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague replaced a rate gyro assembly that helps maintain the orientation of the orbital outpost. It was the fourth spacewalk for Hague and the eighth for Williams.

Williams and Hague also installed patches to cover damaged areas of light filters on the NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) X-ray telescope, replaced a reflector device on one of the international docking adapters, and checked access areas and connector tools that astronauts will use for future Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer maintenance.

Stay up to date with International Space Station activities by visiting the space station blog.

Image credit: NASA

https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/suni-williams-conducts-spacewalk/

Explanation: What's happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual -- it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space, producing an energetic coronal mass ejection (CME). The filament had been held up for days by the Sun's ever changing magnetic field and the timing of the eruption was unexpected. Watched closely by the Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the resulting explosion shot electrons and ions into the Solar System, some of which arrived at Earth three days later and impacted Earth's magnetosphere, causing visible auroras. Loops of plasma surrounding the active region can be seen above the erupting filament in the featured ultraviolet image. Our Sun is nearing the most active time in its 11-year cycle, creating many coronal holes that allow for the ejection of charged particles into space. As before, these charged particles can create auroras.

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the planet Jupiter in a color composite of ultraviolet wavelengths. Released on Nov. 3, 2023, in honor of Jupiter reaching opposition, which occurs when the planet and the Sun are in opposite sides of the sky, this view of the gas giant planet includes the iconic, massive storm called the “Great Red Spot.” Though the storm appears red to the human eye, in this ultraviolet image it appears darker because high altitude haze particles absorb light at these wavelengths. The reddish, wavy polar hazes are absorbing slightly less of this light due to differences in either particle size, composition, or altitude.

Learn more about Hubble and how this type of data can help us learn more about our universe.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Wong (University of California – Berkeley); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

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Two galaxies are squaring off in Corvus. When two galaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. That's because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small amount of that space. During the slow, hundred million year collision, one galaxy can still rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide. In this clash of the titans, dark dust pillars mark massive molecular clouds are being compressed during the galactic encounter, causing the rapid birth of millions of stars, some of which are gravitationally bound together in massive star clusters. (text from APOD) This image has been selected as APOD of 16th March 2014. The raw files comes from Hubble Legacy Archive.

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Joe Velaidum can't help but wonder what could have happened if he'd lingered outside his front door for just a couple of minutes longer before taking his dogs for a walk.

The timing of their departure that day last July proved lucky. Just seconds later, a meteorite would plummet onto the front walkway of Velaidum's home in Marshfield, Prince Edward Island, shattering on impact with a reverberating smack.

"The shocking thing for me is that I was standing right there a couple of minutes right before this impact," Velaidum told CBC News.

"If I'd have seen it, I probably would've been standing right there, so it probably would've ripped me in half."

[Image description: The image shows a bright white point of light surrounded by 17 regularly spaced, hazy dust shells at the bottom, right, and upper right, which look like tree rings. There is noticeably less color in the upper left. The central point, where the two stars are located, has a roughly hexagonal shape.]

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope James Webb Space Telescope have identified two stars responsible for generating carbon-rich dust a mere 5000 light-years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. As the massive stars in Wolf-Rayet 140 swing past one another on their elongated orbits, their winds collide and produce the carbon-rich dust. For a few months every eight years, the stars form a new shell of dust that expands outward — and may eventually go on to become part of stars that form elsewhere in our galaxy.

Every shell is racing away from the stars at more than 2600 kilometers per second, almost 1% the speed of light.

Wolf-Rayet 140 lies just over 5000 light-years away in our Milky Way galaxy.

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Image from July 2022

Side by side comparison of 14 months difference (at 2600 km/s :O).

In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies.

In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself.

Breaking its previous record by flying just 3.8 million miles above the surface of the Sun, NASA's Parker Solar Probe hurtled through the solar atmosphere at a blazing 430,000 miles per hour — faster than any human-made object has ever moved. A beacon tone received late on Dec. 26 confirmed the spacecraft had made it through the encounter safely and is operating normally.

"Flying this close to the Sun is a historic moment in humanity's first mission to a star," said Nicky Fox, who leads the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "By studying the Sun up close, we can better understand its impacts throughout our solar system, including on the technology we use daily on Earth and in space, as well as learn about the workings of stars across the universe to aid in our search for habitable worlds beyond our home planet."