The Artemis II astronauts wrapped up their lunar flyby as they continue their journey back to Earth on Tuesday, bringing with them rich celestial observations including little-known lunar craters, a solar eclipse and meteor strikes that scientists hope will open doors.
The four Artemis astronauts on a lunar flyby are now unreachable by NASA scientists on Earth, an expected communications blackout anticipated to last some 40 minutes as their spacecraft passes behind the moon.
Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons was at the heart of NASA’s control room in Houston on Monday, supporting her Artemis II crewmates remotely during their flight around the moon.
The theory of panspermia holds that life is spread through the cosmos via asteroids, comets, and other objects. When the building blocks of life emerge on one planet, impacts can eject surface material into space, which then carries these seeds to other worlds. For decades, scientists have debated whether this could have occurred between Earth and Mars (in both directions). However, the recent controversy over the possible existence of microbial life in Venus’s dense clouds has sparked discussions of interplanetary transfers between Venus, Earth, and Mars.
The four astronauts embarking on NASA’s lunar flyby became on Monday the humans to travel farthest from our planet, as they get set to view areas of the moon never before seen by the naked eye.
The Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) has discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Known as Cosmic Noon, this is an epoch in the early universe when galaxies were growing their fastest. To spur this growth, they would have needed access to vast reservoirs of hydrogen gas, a key building block for stars. However, until recently, astronomers had only found a handful of these essential structures.
Four Artemis II astronauts are taking a giant step for humankind Monday when they shoot deeper into space than anyone before and glimpse parts of the moon never seen by the naked eye.
Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new “hot Jupiter” exoplanet. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-7169 b, orbits a metal-poor star, which is rare among exoplanets. The finding was detailed in a paper published March 26 on the arXiv pre-print server.
Eyes are on the sky this week as four astronauts get the closest humans have been to the moon for more than 50 years on NASA’s Artemis II mission. Join the millions of people looking up while it’s on its way and we’ll show you how to get the best photo of the moon using your phone.
For the first time in more than half a century, astronauts will fly around the moon on Monday, marking the high point of the Artemis 2’s lunar mission.
The Artemis astronauts entered the final phase of their run-up to a lunar loop on Monday, a tipping point of sorts that means the moon’s gravity is now having a stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.
The four astronauts on NASA’s Artemis 2 mission began their fifth day journeying to the moon on Sunday, after already taking in sights of the lunar surface never before seen by human eyes.
A team of US astronomers has carried out one of the deepest analyses to date of a sample from the asteroid Bennu, revealing new details about how water and organic material interacted during the earliest stages of the solar system.
The Artemis II astronauts are already the champions of a fresh new era of lunar exploration. Now it’s time to set a new distance record.
Designed to hunt for new alien worlds, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has serendipitously observed the rising outburst of a black hole X-ray binary known as AT 2019wey. The observations, which may help us better understand the nature of this system, were presented March 25 on the arXiv pre-print server.
For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. In the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn both rotate rapidly, completing a rotation in roughly ten hours, while accounting for a significant fraction of the solar system’s rotational energy. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai’i, a team of astronomers tested this predicted relationship by studying 32 gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems—6 giant planets larger than Jupiter and 25 brown dwarf companions.
More than 50 years after humans first flew around the moon, Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday and use the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes.
The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it’s hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn’t filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That’s the early universe theorized by a new paper, available in pre-print from arXiv, from researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and MIT anyway.
The Artemis astronauts have taken in sights of the moon never before seen by human eyes, crew members reported on Sunday as their spacecraft crossed the two-thirds mark on their journey to a long-anticipated lunar flyby.
Now more than halfway to the moon, the Artemis II astronauts prepared for their historic lunar fly-around to push deeper into space than even the Apollo astronauts.
