Tag: Space
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Supermassive black hole caught in the act of swallowing a Sun-like star
Black holes, celestial bodies known for their gluttony, usually devour so many unlucky stars that they get too close to them in one big gulp, destroying them with their enormous gravitational pull. But it turns out that some people prefer to have breakfast instead of filling their stomach. Researchers say they have watched a supermassive…
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Japan launches ‘Moon Sniper’ mission: SLIM lander will make precise landing on the moon’s surface
Japan’s compact lander, officially called Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM), is designed to land within 100 meters of a specific target on the Moon, much shorter than the normal range of several kilometers . “Creating a SLIM lander will bring a qualitative change towards humans being able to land where we want, not…
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India’s Chandrayaan-3 rover successfully completes two-week mission
India shut down its moon rover, the first to reach the moon’s south pole, after completing its two-week task to conduct experiments, the country’s space agency said. The Pragyaan rover from the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft was set in “sleep mode”, but the battery was charged and the receiver was operational, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)…
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Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft has a technical fault
Experts are analyzing the situation, it said without giving further details. Earlier, Roscosmos said it had received the first results from the Luna-25 mission and was analyzing them. The agency also posted pictures of the Moon’s Zeeman Crater taken by the spacecraft. It states that the crater is the third-deepest in the Moon’s southern hemisphere,…
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Chandrayaan-3: India’s third lunar mission
It has been a month and two days since the Indian Space Research Organization launched the Chandrayaan-3 mission on July 14. The spacecraft was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. ISRO is striving to make a successful soft landing on the Moon, making India the fourth country in the world…
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NASA’s Curiosity rover finds first evidence of wet-dry climate on Mars, which probably supported life
While climbing the slope of a sedimentary mountain in 2021, Curiosity found salt deposits forming a hexagonal pattern in the soil from about four billion years ago. According to the study published in the journal Nature, the rover’s instruments identified patterns in the form of cracks in the dry soil. “When the lake dries up…
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NASA’s Artemis 3 mission may not include a crewed landing on the Moon, an official said Tuesday
Under the Artemis program, NASA is planning a series of missions of increasing complexity to return to the Moon and create a sustained presence to develop and test technologies for the eventual journey to Mars. The first, Artemis 1, will fly an unmanned spacecraft around the Moon in 2022. Artemis 2, planned for November 2024,…
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Indian lunar landing mission enters Moon’s orbit
If the rest of the current mission goes according to plan, the mission will land safely near the Moon’s little-explored south pole between August 23 and 24. India’s last attempt to do so ended in failure four years ago, when ground control lost contact moments before landing. Developed by ISRO, Chandrayaan-3 consists of a lander…
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Webb telescope spots three debris belts around bright star Fomalhaut
“The secondary gap we see in the system is a strong indication of the presence of an ice giant in the system,” Gaspar said. The observations from Webb, which launched in 2021 and began collecting data last year, were made by its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). “Until now, nearly all resolved images of debris disks were…
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Star swallows planet in first glimpse of Earth’s possible end
The team of researchers from MIT, Harvard and Caltech established that the swallowed planet was a gas giant with a mass similar to Jupiter, but it was so close to its star that it completed one orbit in only a day. This star, which is very similar to the Sun, began by gnawing at the…
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What would the Artemis Moon Base look like?
For its scientific missions, NASA has tasked industry with developing an unpressurized — that is, open top — rover designed for two people by 2028. Unlike the rovers of the Apollo missions, it would have to operate autonomously even without astronauts on board. This means surviving the cold lunar nights, which can last up to…
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Moon shot: Japan firms to attempt historic lunar landing
Hakuto means “white rabbit” in Japanese and refers to the Japanese folklore that a white rabbit lives on the moon. The project was one of five finalists in Google’s Lunar X Prize competition to land a rover on the Moon before the 2018 deadline, which passed without a winner. With only 200 employees, ispace has…
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SpaceX Starship, world’s largest rocket, explodes during maiden flight
The plan for the integrated test flight was for the Super Heavy booster to separate from the Starship after launch and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. They however failed to separate and the booster rocket and Starship spacecraft spun out of control, exploding four minutes into the test flight, in what SpaceX politely called…
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Europe’s JUICE mission to launch to Jupiter’s icy moons
First discovered 400 years ago by astronomer Galileo Galilei, Jupiter’s icy moons were long overlooked as potential candidates to host life. But previous space probes have suggested that beneath their icy shells, there are vast oceans of liquid water – a key ingredient for life as we know it. This has made Ganymede and Europa…
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Webb telescope discovers oldest galaxies ever seen
Stéphane Charlot, a researcher at the Astrophysics Institute of Paris and co-author of the two new studies, told AFP that the most distant galaxy – called JADES-GS-J13-0 – formed 320 million years after the Big Bang. He said that this is the biggest distance observed by astronomers so far. The Webb telescope also confirmed the…