Written by Fabian Klenner, University of Washington Saturn has 146 confirmed moons – more than any other planet in the solar system – but one called Enceladus stands out. It appears to have the ingredients for life. From 2004 to 2017, Cassini – a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian […]
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The world’s largest digital camera is officially ready to begin filming “the greatest movie of all time,” according to its makers. This morning, engineers and scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced the completion of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera, a roughly 6,610-pound, car-sized tool designed to […]
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Despite landing on its side and struggling to maintain power, Odysseus, the first US spacecraft to land on the moon in over half a century, is still somewhat operational. Built by the Houston-based company, Intuitive Machines, “Odie” marked a historic return to the lunar surface, and became the first privately funded venture ever to successfully […]
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Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on Monday that its historic Smart Lander for Investigating Moon has defied the odds—after surviving a brutal, two-week lunar night while upside down, SLIM’s solar cells subsequently gathered enough energy to restart the spacecraft over the weekend. In an early morning post to X, JAXA reported it briefly established […]
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Earlier this week, Delta Air Lines announced an extra flight for its April 8 schedule, timed specifically to provide passengers an aerial view of the total solar eclipse. But if you were still hoping to snag a ticket for the afternoon jaunt alongside the path of totality, you’re already out of luck—seats aboard the Airbus […]
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Looking for a change of pace from your day-to-day routine? Life on Earth feeling a bit overwhelming at the moment? How about a one-year residency alongside three strangers at a 3D-printed Mars habitat simulation? On Friday, NASA announced it is now accepting applications for the second of three missions in its ongoing Crew Health and […]
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It may officially be Hollywood awards season, but NASA is also rolling out a red carpet of its own. On January 12 at 4pm EST, the agency will livestream the official public debut of its highly anticipated X-59 QueSST experimental aircraft. Designed alongside Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works division, the currently one-of-a-kind X-59 QueSST (short […]
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NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter (technically a rotorcraft) has made dozens of tiny aerial jaunts across Mars since first arriving on the planet in February 2021, but its latest flight set a new record for the tiny aircraft. On December 21, NASA reported Ingenuity’s 69th flight was also its farthest, according to its flight log—over 135 seconds, […]
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Satellites have long been the preferred choice for gathering geospatial data for agriculture, forestry, infrastructure and construction projects thanks to the wide swath, high speed and regular frequency of revisit times. But despite the benefits of satellites, they do have some drawbacks, the biggest of which is a dependence on the weather for optical imagery. […]
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSSAn international team of astronomers just measured Jupiter’s raging stratospheric winds for the very first time—and they used a 27-year-old comet to do it. Scientists had already measured wind speeds down in Jupiter’s troposphere—where the planet’s iconic stripes lie—and way up in its ionosphere. But this new study was first to take wind speed measurements […]
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