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Latest by G. Torbet

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mars 2020 perseverance rover

The sound of science: Why audio is the next frontier in Mars exploration

For most of human history, space exploration has been carried out with visual technologies like telescopes. Now, astronomers are turning to microphones
Emerging Tech Features
This image, taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, features the spiral galaxy NGC 4680. Two other galaxies, at the far right and bottom center of the image, flank NGC 4680. NGC 4680 enjoyed a wave of attention in 1997, as it played host to a supernova explosion known as SN 1997bp. Australian amateur astronomer Robert Evans identified the supernova and has identified an extraordinary 42 supernova explosions.

This beautiful galaxy captured by Hubble defies classification

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows no less than three galaxies, including one which can't easily be categorized.
Space News
WISA Woodsat is a 10x10x10 cm ‘CubeSat’ – a type of nanosatellite built up from standardised boxes – but with surface panels made from plywood. Woodsat’s only non-wooden external parts are corner aluminium rails used for its deployment into space plus a metal selfie stick.

Europe to launch renewable wooden satellite made of plywood

A Scandinavian company plans to launch the world's first wooden satellite to bring attention to the use of renewable materials in space.
Space News
Healthy 'space pups' born from sperm which had been freeze-dried on the International Space Station.

Healthy ‘space pup’ mice born from sperm stored on International Space Station

Healthy mice have been born from sperm that was freeze-dried and sent to the International Space Station for nearly six years.
Space News
NEO Surveyor is a new mission proposal designed to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids that are near the Earth.

NASA is designing a space telescope to protect Earth from asteroid impacts

NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope would use infrared sensors to detect asteroids or comets which threaten the planet.
News
blue origin tests crew capsule upgrades in latest rocket launch new shepard test jan 2021

Seat on Blue Origin’s first space tourism flight goes for $28 million

A buyer has bid a massive $28 million for a seat on the first crewed test flight by Blue Origin, the space tourism company founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Space News
Artist’s rendering of TOI-1231 b, a Neptune-like planet about 90 light-years away from Earth.

This Neptune-like planet has a thick atmosphere and maybe even a tail

Oddball planet TOI-1231 b is a bit smaller than Neptune but has a substantial atmosphere, which gives it some interesting astronomical quirks.
Space News
This image looking west toward the Séítah geologic unit on Mars was taken from the height of 33 feet (10 meters) by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter during its sixth flight, on May 22, 2021.

Check out this awesome 360-degree panorama of the Van Zyl Overlook on Mars

You can feel what it would be like to stand on Mars with this 360-degree panorama of the Martian surface, captured by NASA's Perseverance rover.
Space News
Artist impression of ESA's EnVision mission

There’s a third mission traveling to Venus, Earth’s ‘evil twin’

Venus is not an inviting place, but sending probes there could answer some long-standing questions. ESA has announced it will send a mission called EnVision.
Space News
nasa moon far side prism iss062e137200 0 width 1024 1

NASA sending probes to the far side of the moon for the first time

For the first time, NASA will be sending probes to the far side of the moon ahead of the manned Artemis missions later this decade.
Space News
China's Zhurong Mars rover, captured by a wireless camera.

China’s Zhurong rover snaps a selfie on the surface of Mars

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has shared new images of its Zhurong rover on the surface of Mars.
Space News
The Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

How this supercomputer will use A.I. to map the universe’s dark energy

To hunt for the most mysterious force in the universe, you need a powerful computer. Soon the hunt for dark energy will get a boost from a new supercomputer.
Space News
Falcon 9 launches SXM-8 to orbit on SpaceX’s 125th successful mission, Sunday, Jun 6 2021.

SpaceX completes 125th successful mission with nighttime booster landing

SpaceX launched a Sirius XM satellite into orbit early this morning, Sunday, May 6, marking the company's 125th successful mission.
Space News
Artist's impression of a relativistic jet of a gamma-ray burst (GRB), breaking out of a collapsing star, and emitting very-high-energy photons

Astronomers get closest look yet at epic explosion in our ‘cosmic backyard’

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions in the universe, a million trillion times as bright as the sun, and scientists just observed one up close.
Space News
Left to right: The mosaic and geologic maps of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede were assembled incorporating the best available imagery from NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and NASA’s Galileo spacecraft.

Juno will swing by Ganymede, visiting the moon for the first time in 20 years

Jupiter's moon Ganymede is an intriguing place. Tomorrow, the Juno probe will perform a flyby of it, providing the closest encounter in decades.
Space News
spacex sxm 8 launch how to watch sirius xm

How to watch the SpaceX launch its SXM-8 mission tomorrow

SpaceX will launch a SiriusXM satellite tomorrow, Sunday, June 6. SpaceX will livestream the event and we've got all the details on how you can watch from home.
Space News
Eight examples for jellyfish galaxies. Images like these are presented to the participants of the new Zooniverse project for classification.

Astronomers want your help to find cosmic jellyfish galaxies

A new project is inviting the public to help research so-called jellyfish galaxies by going through imagines to identify targets for further study.
Space News
To clean a bit of dust from one of its solar panels, NASA’s InSight lander trickled sand above the panel. The wind-borne sand grains then picked up some dust on the panel, enabling the lander to gain about 30 watt-hours of energy per sol on May 22, 2021, the 884th Martian day of the mission.

Why the Mars InSight lander is covering itself in dirt

The InSight team has come up with a counterintuitive fix for the problem of dust-covered solar panels: They got the lander to dump more dirt onto itself.
Space News
SpaceX Cargo Dragon approaches the International Space Station on Saturday, June 5.

SpaceX Cargo Dragon arrives at space station carrying tiny squid

A SpaceX cargo ship that launched on Thursday, June 3 has arrived safely at the International Space Station (ISS) early this morning, Saturday, June 5.
Space News
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this image on May 22, 2021 using its black and white navigation camera. This camera is mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight.

Mars helicopter Ingenuity gearing up for 7th flight tomorrow

Following a wobbly sixth flight, the plucky helicopter will take to the Martian skies once again tomorrow, Sunday, June 6.
Space News
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:17 a.m. EST on Dec. 6, 2020, carrying the uncrewed cargo Dragon spacecraft on its journey to the International Space Station for NASA and SpaceX’s 21st Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-21) mission. Dragon will deliver more than 6,400 pounds of science investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory. The mission marks the first launch for SpaceX under NASA’s CRS-2 contract.

How to watch the SpaceX resupply mission to the ISS today

This week, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon will launch on a resupply mission to the International Space Station, and we've got the details on how you can watch it live.
Space News
Life on Mars Cosmological Commute

A cosmological commute: The tricky logistics of putting people on Mars

Features
Life on mars: A Cosmological Commute Feature

A cosmological commute: The tricky logistics of putting people on Mars

Putting people on Mars isn't as easy as loading up a rocket and blasting it off into space. Here's why it's trickier than it might seem.
Web Features
This image shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5037, in the constellation of Virgo. First documented by William Herschel in 1785, the galaxy lies about 150 million light-years away from Earth. Despite this distance, we can see the delicate structures of gas and dust within the galaxy in extraordinary detail. This detail is possible using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), whose combined exposures created this image.

Hubble peered across 150 million light-years to image this galaxy

This week's treat from the Hubble Space Telescope is an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 5037, located around 150 million light-years away.
Space News
Transformable lunar robot (left: before transformation, right: after transformation)

Japan wants to send a transforming spherical robot to the moon

The moon could soon be visited by a jolly round robotic friend. The Japanese Space Agency has announced plans to build a transforming lunar rover.
Space News
Chemical space.

Hunting for alien life by examining molecular complexity

A team from Arizona State University has come up with a new approach to the search for alien life using biosignatures, which can look for life more broadly.
Space News
Threads of superheated gas and magnetic fields are weaving a tapestry of energy at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A new image of this new cosmic masterpiece was made using a giant mosaic of data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

NASA shares a spectacular image of the heart of the Milky Way

A stunning image shows the heart of the Milky Way, a chaotic region of threads of gas captured in both the X-ray and radio wavelengths.
Space News
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured these clouds just after sunset on March 19, 2021, the 3,063rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission. The image is made up of 21 individual images stitched together and color corrected so that the scene appears as it would to the human eye.

Curiosity captures shimmering, iridescent ‘mother of pearl’ clouds on Mars

Mars rover Curiosity has been cloud hunting, and it had captured some stunning and intriguing images of clouds in a usually cloudless sky.
Space News
Ten areas in the sky were selected as “deep fields” that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy. Some exceptions include a couple of dozen asteroids as well as a few handfuls of foreground stars in our own Milky Way.

Enormous sky survey creates the most accurate map yet of universe’s dark matter

A project called the Dark Energy Survey has observed more than 226 million galaxies to help unravel the mystery of dark matter.
Space News
This spectacular image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the trailing arms of NGC 2276, a spiral galaxy 120 million light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus. At first glance, the delicate tracery of bright spiral arms and dark dust lanes resembles countless other spiral galaxies. A closer look reveals a strangely lopsided galaxy shaped by gravitational interaction and intense star formation.

Hubble captures a wonky galaxy being pulled out of shape

Most galaxies, like our own Milky Way, tend to be symmetrical. However, sometimes a dramatic event can happen to a galaxy and pull it into an asymmetric shape.
Space News
Image of the moon cast in a red-orange tint during a previous lunar eclipse in 2019.

Here’s how to watch the lunar eclipse this week, live or online

This Wednesday will see this year's only total lunar eclipse, and we've got the details on how to watch the event live in-person or online.
Space News
This packed image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope showcases the galaxy cluster ACO S 295, as well as a jostling crowd of background galaxies and foreground stars. Galaxies of all shapes and sizes populate this image, ranging from stately spirals to fuzzy ellipticals. This galactic menagerie boasts a range of orientations and sizes, with spiral galaxies such as the one at the center of this image appearing almost face on, and some edge-on spiral galaxies visible only as thin slivers of light.

See a glittering gang of galaxies in this week’s Hubble image

This week's Hubble image shows a glittering host of galaxies of all shapes and sizes, dominated by the galaxy cluster ACO S 295.
Space News
This look back at a dune that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove across was taken by the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam) on Feb. 9, 2014, or the 538th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's mission.

Detecting organic salts on Mars is key to finding evidence of life there

Finding evidence there was once life on Mars isn't as simple a flipping open a tricorder to scan for life signs. It's a matter of careful, painstaking research.
Space News
VSS Unity in space over New Mexico

Virgin Galactic spaceplane makes it to boundary of space on third test flight

After a few stumbles, Virgin Galactic has succeed in its third test flight of its spaceplane, which will be available for space tourism flights in the future.
Space News
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