Astronomy

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 21 Starlink internet satellites, 13 of which have direct-to-cell capability, to orbit on Wednesday night (March 12).

A mission to survey the results of a deliberate crash between an asteroid and a NASA spacecraft has taken stunning images of Mars and its moon Deimos

A mission to survey the results of a deliberate crash between an asteroid and a NASA spacecraft has taken stunning images of Mars and its moon Deimos

Located on a mountaintop in Chile, the nearly complete Vera C. Rubin Observatory will capture the Universe in incredible detail. This week saw another huge step for the observatory with the installation of the car sized - yes car sized - LSST camera onto the Simonyi Survey Telescope. The camera is the largest ever built, weighing in at over 3,000 kilograms with an impressive 3,200 megapixels. Coupled to the 8.4 metre optics of the Rubin will allow it to capture everything that happens in the southern sky, night after night.

To reduce the growing risk of intense wildfires, California is cutting and burning the areas that fuel them – but these efforts may be moving too slowly

To reduce the growing risk of intense wildfires, California is cutting and burning the areas that fuel them – but these efforts may be moving too slowly

While performing yesterday’s flyby of Mars, ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence made the first use of its payload for scientific purposes beyond Earth and the Moon. Activating a trio of instruments, Hera imaged the surface of the red planet as well as the face of Deimos, the smaller and more mysterious of Mars’s two moons.

On March 11, the California skyline was once again treated to the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Vandenberg Space Force Base. It carried two missions into space; SPHEREx to study the origins of the Universe and the molecular clouds of the Milky Way and four other satellites making up PUNCH. This latter mission is tasked with exploring how the Sun’s outer atmosphere causes the solar wind.

Mummy aroma may provide insight into social class and historical period, according to a team of trained mummy sniffers

Electrolysis has been a mainstay of crewed mission designs for the outer solar system for decades. It is the most commonly used methodology to split oxygen from water, creating a necessary gas from a necessary liquid. However, electrolysis systems are bulky and power-intensive, so NASA has decided to look into alternative solutions. They supported a company called Precision Combustion, Inc (PCI) via their Institutes for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to work on a system of thermo-photo-catalytic conversion that could dramatically outperform existing electrolysis reactors.

The moon will put on quite the show tonight; we've got everything to make sure you don't miss all the total lunar eclipse action.

High above the Arctic Circle, on the rugged terrain of Andøya, three ESA radionavigation engineers take a rare moment to unwind with a game of shuffleboard. Outside, sheep graze under the shimmering northern lights, a serene backdrop to their demanding mission: test how navigation technologies withstand interference signals. With 100TB of data collected over 5 days, their efforts promise to strengthen the reliability of satellite navigation for the benefit of us all.

The James Webb Space Telescope has found perhaps its most profound discovery to date. The uncovered preferred direction for galaxies supports the idea that the universe was born in a black hole.

European scientists are asking volunteers to lie down on a waterbed for 10 days as part of a pioneering dry immersion study to recreate some of the effects of spaceflight on the body.

NASA’s Perseverance rover found large crystals of quartz with a high purity on Mars, which probably had to have formed in the presence of hot water

NASA’s Perseverance rover found large crystals of quartz with a high purity on Mars, which probably had to have formed in the presence of hot water

Very faint planetary nebula Abell 7 is about 1,800 light-years distant.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have completed a survey of galaxies that reveals their rotation directions with unprecedented clarity. Contrary to expectations that galaxy rotations would be randomly distributed, they discovered a surprising pattern, that most galaxies appear to rotate in a similar direction! One hypothesis suggests the universe itself might have an overall rotation, researchers believe a more plausible explanation though is that Earth's motion through space creates an observational bias, making galaxies rotating in certain directions more detectable than others.

If you're a regular visitor to Universe Today, you've probably noticed that the website looks dramatically different. Simpler, cleaner, without all those pesky intrusive ads. We're in a new era, now. Here's what happened, why I decided to remove the ads from the site, and what you can expect going forward.