Washington DC (UPI) Dec 17, 2020
Astronomers have discovered a massive intergalactic gas filament measuring at least 50 million light years in length - the longest yet to be found. Intergalactic filaments are long threads of hot gas that weave their way through galaxies and link together galactic clusters. Just five percent of the universe is made up of ordinary, or visible, matter. So far, astronomers have vis

Los Alamos NM (SPX) Dec 18, 2020
A combination of astrophysical measurements has allowed researchers to put new constraints on the radius of a typical neutron star and provide a novel calculation of the Hubble constant that indicates the rate at which the universe is expanding. "We studied signals that came from various sources, for example recently observed mergers of neutron stars," said Ingo Tews, a theorist in Nuclear

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Dec 21, 2020
Lengthened to the size of a tennis court, the five-layer sunshield of NASA's fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed a final series of large-scale deployment and tensioning tests. This milestone puts the observatory one step closer to its launch in 2021. "This is one of Webb's biggest accomplishments in 2020," said Alphonso Stewart, Webb deployment systems lead fo

Orlando FL (UPI) Dec 25, 2020
NASA is testing a space radiation protection vest aboard the International Space Station that could shield astronauts from deadly solar flares on missions to the moon and Mars. Solar storms with high doses of radiation are among the biggest threats to astronauts on deep space missions. The worst such storms could make space flyers too sick to function and eventually kill them. The ne

Huntsville AL (SPX) Dec 25, 2020
Designed and built by Northrop Grumman, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is part of NASA's fleet of "Great Observatories," allowing scientists from around the world to explore very hot regions of exploded stars, clusters of galaxies and matter around black holes. In an elliptical orbit over 85,000 miles from the Earth, Chandra's X-ray images of some of the most extreme phenomena are leading to disc

Sriharikota, India (SPX) Dec 25, 2020
India's second mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-2 was launched on 22nd July 2019 from Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota. The Orbiter which was injected into a lunar orbit on 2nd Sept 2019, carries 8 experiments to address many open questions on lunar science. All experiments have been performing well and the data received, suggests excellent capability to deliver on the pre-launch promises

Beijing (XNA) Dec 25, 2020
China's lunar rover Yutu-2, or Jade Rabbit-2, has survived 719 Earth days and traveled 600.55 meters on the far side of the moon as of Tuesday. Both the lander and the rover of the Chang'e-4 probe have ended their work for the 25th lunar day, and switched to the dormant mode for the lunar night due to the lack of solar power, according to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of t

Orlando FL (UPI) Dec 25, 2020
Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and a lesser-known company, Huntsville, Ala.-based Dynetics, are preparing for a major decision by NASA early in 2021 about which company will build human-carrying landers for trips to the moon. The three space firms were selected in April to submit proposals early this month. Having done that, they now await NASA's decision, which is scheduled

Washington DC (SPX) Dec 25, 2020
It took fifteen years of imaging and nearly three years of stitching the pieces together to create the largest image ever made, the 8-trillion-pixel mosaic of Mars' surface. Now, the first study to utilize the image in its entirety provides unprecedented insight into the ancient river systems that once covered the expansive plains in the planet's southern hemisphere. These three billion-year-old

Changchun, China (XNA) Dec 25, 2020
An international team of researchers has identified over 109,000 previously unrecognized impact craters on the moon using machine learning methods. The study, led by researchers from Jilin University, was published in the journal Nature Communications. Impact craters are the most prominent lunar surface feature and occupy most of the moon's surface. With traditional automatic identif