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.
As four astronauts whiz toward a flyby of the moon, looking out for them are mission control experts using cutting-edge technology and lessons learned from the Apollo program 50 years ago.
They’re sipping smoothies, snapping phone pics, dealing with crashed email and fixing broken toilets: astronauts, they’re just like us.
NASA is joining international partners to hunt for ice on the moon in support of future human exploration. The agency is providing a water-detecting instrument, the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS), to the Lunar Polar Exploration (LUPEX) mission led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization).
The Artemis 2 astronauts have passed the halfway point between Earth and the moon on Saturday as they sped toward a planned lunar flyby, with NASA releasing initial images of Earth taken from inside the Orion spacecraft.
Artemis 2 astronaut Jeremy Hansen felt like he was “falling out of the sky” as his spacecraft followed its complex flight path to the moon, the Canadian said in a Saturday video call.
The Artemis II astronauts have captured our blue planet’s brilliant beauty as they zoom ever closer to the moon.
The interiors of ice giant planets like Uranus and Neptune could be home to a previously unknown state of matter, according to new computational simulations by Carnegie’s Cong Liu and Ronald Cohen. Their work, published in Nature Communications, predicts that a quasi-one-dimensional superionic state of carbon hydride exists under the extreme pressures and temperatures found deep inside these outer solar system bodies.
An unusual team of astronomers used Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V (SDSS-V) data and observations on the Magellan telescopes at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to discover the most pristine star in the known universe, called SDSS J0715-7334. Their work is published in Nature Astronomy.
The Artemis II astronauts have captured our blue planet’s brilliant beauty as they zoom ever closer to the moon.
In an unusual perspective for an Earth-observing satellite, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured this image of the moon, Earth’s only natural satellite. The Sentinel-2 mission acquired this lunar image by rolling one of its satellites sideways to view the moon instead of Earth. This is part of a regular calibration process, whereby the stable intensity of the moon’s light makes it possible to detect and correct even the smallest changes in the performance of Sentinel-2’s instrument. This ensures data accuracy throughout the mission, which is critical for its applications.
This month’s NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month offers us a two-for-one on brand new stars—with some potential planets thrown in as well. This visual highlights Webb’s views of the protoplanetary disks Tau 042021 (left) and Oph 163131 (right), otherwise known by the catalog numbers 2MASS J04202144+2813491 and 2MASS J16313124-2426281, respectively. Tau 042021 is situated around 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, while Oph 163131 lies about 480 light-years away in Ophiuchus.
