Update August 18th, 11:20AM ET: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket and then landed the vehicle on a drone ship in the ocean, potentially opening up the possibility of a seventh flight for the vehicle. All of the satellites on board the rocket successfully deployed into their intended orbits. Original Story: This morning, SpaceX…
NASA may have updated its plan to protect the planet from asteroid strikes, but a space rock the size of a pickup truck zipped past the planet at a distance of approximately 1,830 miles on Sunday, the closest ever recorded.And the space agency didn’t see it until after it happened.The asteroid, known as 2020 QG…
Just as you thought it was safe to go back to ignoring Betelgeuse, the red giant star started acting up again. After its first round of dimming, and then brightening, Betelgeuse has now started to dim once again. Moreover, this new dimming is inconsistent with Betelgeuse’s current brightness variation cycle – so, once again, the…
Mask prototype during UV disinfection. (Horvath et al., Advanced Functional Materials, 2020) The benefits of wearing face masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19 are now well understood, but scientists are still searching for better materials to use – and a filter ‘paper’ made up of titanium oxide nanowires is showing a lot of…
NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa. This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA…
SpaceX and NASA are ready to send their next team of astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and October 23rd has been set as the earliest launch date. The mission, named Crew-1, was originally planned for late September. “Crew-1 will launch in late October to accommodate spacecraft traffic for the upcoming Soyuz crew rotation…
Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock. The universe’s perpetual clock keeps on clicking off the seconds, even in peculiar times such as these, when work weeks seem to fly past like hours and months are a silent blur. But just to put things into proper perspective for how insignificant our strictly-defined daily blocks of time truly are, one inquisitive scientist has devised a formula to predict…
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet’s surface for future missions to retrieve, as seen in this illustration. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech The board will assist with analysis of current plans and goals for one of the most difficult missions humanity has ever undertaken. NASA has established…
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have solved a mystery that has long puzzled scientists: How do the bodies of female humans and all other mammals decide which of the two X chromosomes it carries in each cell should be active and which one should be silent? In a breakthrough study…
NASA launches mission to Mars NASA launches mission to Mars 01:52 So far, so good for the small helicopter that is poised to become the first to fly in outer space. NASA announced that the Mars Ingenuity helicopter is alive and well and was successfully recharged while in mid-spaceflight. Ingenuity is currently positioned in the…
