With Artemis II successfully completing its historic lunar mission on Friday, NASA is banking on billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for the next step: landing astronauts on the moon.
When NASA flight director Zebulon Scoville was working a shift during the uncrewed Artemis I test flight, he realized the US space agency wasn’t consistently livestreaming the spacecraft’s journey to Earth.
Artemis II’s astronauts closed out humanity’s first lunar voyage in more than half a century with a Pacific splashdown on Friday, blazing new records near the moon with grace and joy.
Elements essential to life, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, were “delivered” to Earth and the moon during the early stages of the solar system via asteroids and comets impacting their surfaces. These exogenous materials may have provided the chemical building blocks necessary for the origin and early evolution of life on Earth. But extensive geological activity and biological processes on Earth have largely erased the direct records of these early inputs on our planet.
Observations conducted with the Subaru Telescope and its first-generation wide-field camera, Suprime-Cam, have revealed new insights into the relationship between the color and size of Jupiter Trojan asteroids.
Thirty-four years after Cornell University scientists first conceived it, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) now rises above the Atacama Desert, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile. FYST will help answer some of the most important questions in astronomy, including how the universe works, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve and what happened in those mysterious first moments after the Big Bang.
Researchers from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy have flipped a long-held assumption in optics, showing that deliberately introducing controlled disorder into ultra-thin optical devices can dramatically increase their power and versatility, without making them bigger or more complex.
As the Orion spacecraft hurtles home, friction caused by reentry into Earth’s atmosphere will drastically decrease its speed from a potential 25,000 miles per hour (40,000 kilometers per hour).
Most polychaete species spend their lives in burrows in the seabed. However, adult individuals of two species, Alitta succinea and Platynereis dumerilii, leave their burrows to spawn during warm summer nights around the full moon.
Their dramatic grand finale fast approaching, Artemis II’s astronauts aimed for a splashdown in the Pacific on Friday to close out humanity’s first voyage to the moon in more than half a century.
The European Space Agency has achieved a European first with Celeste, successfully transmitting a navigation signal from low Earth orbit, following the launch of the mission’s first satellites on March 28.
Deep underground in a Canadian mine, a refrigerator nearly 1,000 times colder than outer space has just reached its target temperature—a milestone that brings scientists one step closer to potentially detecting dark matter, the invisible material thought to make up most of the mass in the universe.
The acquisition of the radio frequency signal from the Artemis II crewed mission to the moon by NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is indicated by the peak in the data signal shown on the top computer screen.
Mercury released into the oceans affects marine environments worldwide. Traditionally, its distribution and quantity have been estimated using marine biogeochemical simulation models.
The four Artemis II astronauts who looped around the moon this week are expected to splash down soon. NASA’s grand mission spells a return to human deep-space travel, with renewed interest in building a long-term moon base.
The Artemis II astronauts conducted a historic lunar flyby, gathered invaluable data and took in unprecedented moon views, but one of the most crucial moments of their 10-day mission is still to come: Friday’s splashdown.
While the Artemis II astronauts have been protected from the icy vacuum of space on their journey, their bodies have nonetheless been left exposed to possibly high levels of radiation—a danger of space travel that NASA is anxiously waiting to study.
Drawing ever closer to Earth, the Artemis II astronauts tidied up their lunar cruiser for its upcoming “fireball” return and reflected on their historic journey around the moon, describing it as surreal and profound.
On April 10, Artemis II—humanity’s first mission to the moon in more than half a century—will draw to a close when the Orion capsule carrying four crew members detaches from its service module.
A research group has successfully determined, for the first time in the world, the capsid (outer shell) structure of Melbournevirus—a member of the giant virus family—at a resolution of 4.4 Å using cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). The work is published in the journal Viruses. The team was led by Project Professor Kazuyoshi Murata at the Exploratory Research Center on Life and Living Systems (ExCELLS) / National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), in collaboration with Senior Researcher Kenta Okamoto at Uppsala University and Professor Chantal Abergel at Aix-Marseille University.
