
Copernical Team
Crashing rocket will create new moon crater: What we should worry about

It's not often that the sudden appearance of a new impact crater on the moon can be predicted, but it's going to happen on March 4, when a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into it.
The rocket launched in 2015, carrying NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) probe into a position 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, facing the Sun. But the expended upper stage of the rocket had insufficient speed to escape into an independent orbit around the Sun, and was abandoned without an option to steer back into the Earth's atmosphere. That would be normal practice, allowing stages to burn up on re-entry, thus reducing the clutter in near-Earth space caused by dangerous junk.
Week in images: 24 - 28 January 2022

Week in images: 24 - 28 January 2022
Discover our week through the lens
Island in a lake of lava - the Martian volcano Jovis Tholus

Tiny but very large wavelength perturbations solve Hubble Tension

Instant turn-over of magnetism by gyro motion of relativistic electrons

Mysterious object unlike anything astronomers have seen before

NASA's MRO Finds Water Flowed on Mars Longer Than Previously Thought

China releases new-generation spacecraft OS

SCOUT releases autonomy software to enable safer and less complex space operations

Earth from Space: Lesotho

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over northwest Lesotho – a small, land-locked country surrounded entirely by South Africa.