On Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will swoop within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun’s surface at a whopping 430,000 mph (690,000 kph), breaking its own records for speed and closest approach to our star. The spacecraft, roughly the size of a small car, completed its final swing past Venus last …
Rocket Lab’s pioneering suborbital launch last month conducted hypersonic tests for the U.S. military, the company has revealed. The mission in question lifted off on Nov. 24 from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Virginia’s Wallops Island. It employed HASTE, the suborbital variant of Rocket Lab‘s workhorse Electron launcher. Less than 22 hours later, an …
Rocket Lab’s Secretive Launch Last Month Was A Hypersonic Test For The US Military. Read More »
Emily Calandrelli made history on Nov. 22, 2024, when she became the 100th woman to go to space. But thanks to “small men on the internet,” the monumental milestone was marred by misogyny, Calandrelli told Live Science. “This is something that I had been working towards for two decades,” the astronaut, MIT engineer, bestselling author, …
SpaceX is gearing up for the seventh test flight of its Starship megarocket, which could take place in just a month or so. The company conducted a static-fire test with Flight 7’s Super Heavy first-stage booster today (Dec. 9), briefly igniting its 33 Raptor engines at a pad at SpaceX‘s Starbase facility in South Texas. …
SpaceX Test-Fires Super Heavy Booster For 7th Starship Launch. Read More »
The sun appears to have woken from its slumber with an impulsive X-class solar flare, the most powerful class of solar flare. The dramatic eruption originated from sunspot region 3912, reaching its peak at 4:06 a.m. EST (0906 GMT) on Dec. 8, and was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a large plume …
In October, a Pan-Atlantic University (PAU) team developed Nigeria’s first Mars rover prototype, Trailblazer. The team secured second place at the African Rover Challenge, a competition showcasing engineering talent across the continent. They received a prize of ZAR 2,000 (USD 113.9). The African Rover Challenge required participants to design and build a small, mobile Mars …
Innovation on Wheels: Inside Nigeria’s First Mars Rover Prototype. Read More »
SpaceX launched another batch of its broadband satellites from Florida (Dec. 8). A Falcon 9 rocket launched 23 Starlink spacecraft, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sunday at 12:12 a.m. EST (0512 GMT). The rocket’s first stage came down for a landing on the SpaceX droneship “A Shortfall …
SpaceX Launches 23 Starlink Internet Satellites From Florida. Read More »
Iran successfully launched on Friday its heaviest space payload, which includes a satellite and a space tug, using a domestically developed satellite carrier, official media reported. Weighing 300 kilograms, the payload consisted of the Fakhr-1 telecommunications satellite and the Saman-1 space tug, according to state television. The Saman-1 is an “orbital transmission system” designed to …
Iran Launches Heaviest Space Payload Into Orbit. Read More »
A SpaceX cargo capsule is set to head back toward Earth on Dec. 12, and you can watch the action live. A robotic Dragon freighter will undock from the International Space Station‘s (ISS) Harmony module on Thursday, Dec. 12 at 11:05 a.m. EST (1605 GMT), if all goes according to plan. An undocking attempt set …
Watch SpaceX’s 31st Dragon Cargo Capsule Head Back To Earth Dec. 12 After Delay. Read More »
Europe’s Vega-C rocket returned to flight Thursday (Dec. 5) with a successful mission, two years after suffering a catastrophic failure. Vega-C, which is operated by the French company Arianespace, launched the Copernicus Sentinel-1C Earth-observation satellite on Thursday, lifting off from Kourou, French Guiana at 4:20 p.m. EST (2120 GMT; 6:20 p.m. local time). The mission …
