Tag Archives: Aerospace

Launched on April 14, 2023, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice; formerly known as JUICE) spacecraft has finally completed the unfurling of its solar panel arrays and plethora of booms, probes, and antennae while en route to the solar system’s largest planet. However, Juice’s first six weeks in space haven’t been so smooth, as its Radar ...

The European Space Agency’s latest third generation Meteosat-I 1 weather satellite shows its stuff, with more to come. You’ve never seen the Earth and its complex weather systems like this. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently unveiled views from their latest weather satellite in geostationary (GEO) orbit, Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I 1). MTG-I 1 promises to revolutionize crucial full-disk ...

New images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) appear to show the crash site where the Japanese Hakuto-R Mission 1 lunar lander impacted the surface of the Moon a month ago. The refrigerator-sized HAKUTO-R was built by the startup company iSpace and was launched in December 2022 with the goal of becoming the first commercial lunar lander to touch down ...

Most black holes are stellar mass black holes. They’re created when a star several times more massive than our Sun reaches the end and collapses in on itself. There are also supermassive black holes (SMBH,) the behemoths at the center of galaxies that can boast billions of times more mass than the Sun. But where are the intermediate-mass black holes? ...

Artist depiction of the fully deployed Lunar Flashlight mission. Credit – NASA / JPL-Caltech NASA missions can be categorized into two types. One type includes headline-grabbing missions, such as the JWST or New Horizons, that take decades to design and plan. Typically those larger missions include many flight-tested components that had already been used on other missions in the past. ...

A team of theoretical astrophysicists have studied in detail a hypothetical form of dark matter that combines to form dark atoms. They found that the existence of dark atoms can drastically affect the evolution of galaxies. We don’t understand the vast majority of matter in the universe. We call it dark matter, but that’s about the best we’ve got. To ...

A lot has changed since the last Space Age. Unlike the days of Sputnik, Vostok, Mercury, and Apollo, the current era is not defined by two superpowers constantly vying for dominance and one-upmanship. More than ever, international cooperation is the name of the game, with space agencies coming together to advance common exploration and science goals. Similarly, there is the ...

Can anyone keep up with SpaceX in the commercial space race? It might be one of the four companies profiled in “When the Heavens Went on Sale” — a new book written by Ashlee Vance, the tech journalist who chronicled SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s feats and foibles eight years ago. Or it might be one of the dozens of other space ventures that have risen ...

JUICE is having problems extending its radar antenna. Astronomers watch a star eat its planet. A design for a space station with artificial gravity. JUICE Has Problems ESA’s Jupiter Ice Moons Explorer spacecraft is on its way to the Jovian System, where it’ll be mapping out several of its icy moons. Unfortunately, a critical antenna has failed to deploy. The ...

An artist’s illustration of the Falcon Heavy. Credit: SpaceX During the recent ViaSat-3 launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket, SpaceX released the protective spacecraft fairing at the highest altitude ever attempted. Therefore, the fairing reached incredible speeds during its fiery re-entry through the Earth’s atmosphere. Fortunately, there was a camera on board so we could watch. At one point, the ...