The Artemis II crew and teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program successfully completed on Sept. 20, the first in a series of integrated ground system tests at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for the upcoming mission around the Moon. via NASA https://ift.tt/VCboxvH
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s arm reached out and touched asteroid 101955 Bennu on October 20, 2020, after a careful approach to the small, near-Earth asteroid’s boulder-strewn surface. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this close-up recorded by the spacecraft’s SamCam. The […]
“The stars aligned – I was working at Johnson Space Center in Houston about six months later. That’s how I got here, in a roundabout way.” — Isidro Reyna, Strategic Communications Manager, Strategic Integration and Management Division, Space Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters via NASA https://ift.tt/xW01X3Z
Where else might life exist? One of humanity’s great outstanding questions, locating planets where extrasolar life might survive took a step forward in 2019 with the discovery of a significant amount of water vapor in the atmosphere of distant exoplanet K2-18b. The planet and its parent star, K2-18, lie about 124 light years away toward […]
via NASA https://ift.tt/PlgtWdF
Do stars always create jets as they form? No one is sure. As a gas cloud gravitationally contracts, it forms a disk that can spin too fast to continue contracting into a protostar. Theorists hypothesize that this spin can be reduced by expelling jets. This speculation coincides with known Herbig-Haro (HH) objects, young stellar objects […]
The sprite and tree could hardly be more different. To start, the red sprite is an unusual form of lightning, while the tree is a common plant. The sprite is far away — high in Earth’s atmosphere, while the tree is nearby — only about a football field away. The sprite is fast — electrons […]
What are those dark streaks in this composite image of a solar eclipse? They are reversed shadows of mountains at the edge of the Moon. The center image, captured from Xiamen, China, has the Moon’s center directly in front of the Sun’s center. The Moon, though, was too far from the Earth to completely block […]
On September 12, from a location just south of the Arctic Circle, stones of Iceland’s modern Arctic Henge point skyward in this startling scene. Entertaining an intrepid group of aurora hunters during a geomagnetic storm, alluring northern lights dance across the darkened sky when a stunning fireball meteor explodes. Awestruck, the camera-equipped skygazers captured video […]
“It’s amazing when I get a chance to see the space station fly over. I am very fortunate to be able to say that my hands were on a lot of the hardware that is up there. I’m very proud to have been part of the International Space Station program.” — Liliana Villarreal, Artemis Landing […]