Day: September 12, 2024

Astronomers have gotten the first-ever detailed views of turbulent activity in a star other than our own sun. A time-lapse video released Wednesday (Sept. 11) shows enormous gas bubbles roiling on a nearby star called R Doradus, a red giant about 300 times bigger than our sun that lies roughly 180 light-years away, in the …

The Bubbling Surface Of A Distant Star Was Captured On Video For The 1st Time Ever. Read More »

AST SpaceMobile’s first five commercial satellites have reached orbit. The huge spacecraft, called BlueBirds, lifted off today (Sept. 12) at 4:52 a.m. EDT (0852 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Falcon 9’s first stage returned to Earth about 7.5 minutes later, making a vertical touchdown …

SpaceX Launches 5 Giant BlueBird Smartphone Satellites For AST SpaceMobile, Lands Rocket. Read More »

The distant and cold Voyager 1 spacecraft did a clever thruster trick to help it phone home. Voyager 1, the most distant human object that is now flying through interstellar space, had thruster issues making it difficult for the spacecraft to stay pointed at Earth when calling home. Unless Voyager 1 could make a switch …

NASA’s Voyager 1 Probe Swaps Thrusters In Tricky Fix As It Flies Through Interstellar Space. Read More »

A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) this afternoon after a brief orbital chase. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA’s Don Pettit and Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner of the Russian space agency Roscosmos docked with the ISS today at 3:32 p.m. EDT (1932 GMT), as the two …

NASA Astronaut, 2 Cosmonauts Arrive At ISS Aboard Russian Soyuz Capsule. Read More »

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Salsa satellite safely deorbited on Sunday (Sept. 8) over a hand-picked region of the South Pacific Ocean, in a carefully guided reentry that agency officials have applauded as the world’s first. Salsa was one of a quartet of identical satellites called Cluster, which launched in 2000 to monitor Earth’s magnetic …

European Satellite Burns Up In Landmark Controlled Reentry. Read More »

A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts launched toward the International Space Station today (Sept. 11). NASA astronaut Don Pettit joined Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which lifted off atop a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today at 12:23 p.m. EDT (1623 GMT; 9:23 p.m. local …

Soyuz Rocket Launches New US-Russian Crew Of 3 To ISS. Read More »

Polaris Dawn may be a private mission, but it’s conducting research that will benefit NASA. Polaris Dawn lifted off early Tuesday morning (Sept. 10) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, sending four people to orbit for a roughly five-day stay aboard the Crew Dragon capsule “Resilience.” The mission aims to make exploration history, conducting the …

Meet The NASA Science Flying On SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn Private Astronaut Mission. Read More »