Long Beach CA (SPX) Jan 07, 2021
Rocket Lab, the global leader in dedicated small satellite launch, has announced its first Electron launch of the new year will be a dedicated mission for European space technology company OHB Group. This dedicated mission, named 'Another One Leaves the Crust,' is scheduled for lift-off during a 10-day launch window opening on January 16th NZT/UTC. Encapsulated inside Electron's fairing wi

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 07, 2021
On 17 August 2017, an alert went out roughly 40 minutes after the LIGO observatory detected gravitational waves from a pair of colliding neutron stars. This alert sent telescopes worldwide slewing rapidly in an all-hands-on-deck effort to image the fireworks show accompanying the merger. But what if that alert had gone out before the collision? b>When Stars Collide br> /b> When neu

Image: The Sun in 2020

Providence RI (SPX) Jan 05, 2021
Sea ice is a critical indicator of changes in the Earth's climate. A new discovery by Brown University researchers could provide scientists a new way to reconstruct sea ice abundance and distribution information from the ancient past, which could aid in understanding human-induced climate change happening now. In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers show that an orga

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 06, 2021
Astronomers refer to observations as "deep" when they are taken with very long exposure times. Just as with photography, this gathers more light, revealing distant, fainter objects. Deeper exposures let astronomers look deeper into the Universe - hence the name. This particular deep image was taken with a 70-minute exposure with the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Obse

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 06, 2021
NASA's upcoming space telescope, the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx, is one step closer to launch. The mission has officially entered Phase C, in NASA lingo. That means the agency has approved preliminary design plans for the observatory, and work can begin on creating a final, detailed design, as well as on building the ha

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jan 06, 2021
A secret behind the workings of sunquakes - seismic activity on the Sun during solar flares - might be hidden beneath the solar surface. These earthquake-like events release acoustic energy in the form of waves that ripple along the Sun's surface, like waves on a lake, in the minutes following a solar flare - an outburst of light, energy, and material seen in the Sun's outer atmosphere.

Ithica NY (SPX) Jan 05, 2021
From a mountain high in Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers with the National Science Foundation's Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the oldest light in the universe. Their new observations plus a bit of cosmic geometry suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years. The new estimate matches the one provided by the standard mo

Beijing (XNA) Jan 05, 2021
China's Tianwen 1 robotic Mars probe had traveled more than 400 million kilometers by Sunday morning and is set to enter a Mars orbit next month, according to the China National Space Administration. By 6 am Sunday, the spacecraft had flown for 163 days on an Earth-Mars transfer trajectory and was about 8.3 million km from the red planet, the administration said in a statement, adding that

Stennis Space Center MS (SPX) Jan 06, 2021
NASA is targeting the final test in the Green Run series, the hot fire, for as early as Jan.17. The hot fire is the culmination of the Green Run test series, an eight-part test campaign that gradually brings the core stage of the Space Launch System (SLS) - the deep space rocket that will power the agency's next-generation human Moon missions - to life for the first time. NASA conducted th