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SPACE: SpaceX Could Launch Unmanned Mission to Mars in 2024

SpaceX Starship

SpaceX is almost ready to start building a permanent human settlement on Mars with its massive Starship rocket. The private spaceflight company is on track to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars in as little as four years from now, SpaceX’s founder and CEO Elon Musk said Friday (Oct. 16) at the International Mars Society Convention. “I think we have a fighting chance of making that second Mars transfer window,” Musk said in a discussion with Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin. You can watch a replay of the talk here. That window Musk referred to is a launch opportunity … Read more

SPACE: Garbage Problem in Orbit is Getting Worse

space garbage - NASA

Before humans first started sending objects into Earth orbit, the pocket of space around our planet was clear and clean. But the launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957 changed everything. Since then, the space debris has been accumulating, with the amount of useless, defunct satellites vastly outnumbering the operational objects in our orbit. A new annual report from the European Space Agency (ESA) has found that while we have become aware of the problem and taken steps in recent years to mitigate it, those steps are currently not keeping up with the sheer scale of space junk. All … Read more

SPACE: Astronomers Watch Black Hole Turn Star Into Spaghetti

spaghetti - pixabay

A black hole in a galaxy not far from Earth gobbled up a star like it was a big, exploding noodle, and astronomers got a front-row seat to the action. The “unfortunate star,” as the researchers called it in their paper, was orbiting in the dense nucleus of a galaxy with the unwieldy name 2MASX J04463790-1013349 about 214 million years ago when it found itself on a doomed path. It had wandered too close to the galaxy’s central, supermassive black hole. And that black hole stretched it out like spaghetti and swallowed it one big gulp. (Scientists literally call this … Read more

Astrophysicists Figure Out How Much Stuff There Is

universe - pixabay

The stuff that makes up our universe is tricky to measure, to put it mildly. We know that most of the universe’s matter-energy density consists of dark energy, the mysterious unknown force that’s driving the universe’s expansion. And we know that the rest is matter, both normal and dark. Accurately figuring out the proportions of these three is a challenge, but researchers now say they’ve performed one of the most precise measurements yet to determine the proportion of matter. According to their calculations, normal matter and dark matter combined make up 31.5 percent of the matter-energy density of the universe. … Read more

Apollo Moon Landing Films Restored With AI Help

Apollo Moon Landing - NASA/DutchSteamMachine

Astronauts on NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon captured astounding movies of the lunar surface, but recent enhancements with artificial intelligence (AI) have really made the films out of this world.  In remastered movies shared online by by DutchSteamMachine, a YouTube channel run by a film restoration specialist in the Netherlands, details from lunar scenes are astonishingly crisp and vivid; from mission commander Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon in 1969 to bumpy lunar rover drives during Apollo 15 and 16 in 1971 and 1972, respectively. The film restorer behind DutchSteamMachine, who also goes by “Niels,” used AI to stabilize shaky footage and generate new … Read more

The ISS is Getting a New Space Toilet!

space toilet - pixabay

A robotic Cygnus spacecraft successfully blasted off from Virginia late Friday (Oct. 2) carrying nearly 4 tons of gear, including a new space toilet, to the International Space Station. A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket lit up the night sky alongside a nearly full moon at 9:16 p.m. EDT (0116 GMT on Oct. 3) as it launched the Cygnus NG-14 mission to the space station from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. The craft is hauling 7,624 lbs. (3,458 kilograms) of cargo that includes scientific equipment, an experimental space toilet, food, hardware and other … Read more

SpaceX to Test “Mars Colonizing Spaceship”

SpaceX Mars Spaceship - SpaceX

The next big leap for SpaceX’s Mars-colonizing Starship spacecraft appears to be right around the corner. Two full-size Starship prototypes, known as SN5 and SN6, recently performed 500-foot-high (150 meters) test hops at SpaceX’s South Texas facilities, near the village of Boca Chica. And the next vehicle in line is nearly ready to soar much higher, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said. “SN8 Starship with flaps & nosecone should be done in about a week. Then static fire, checkouts, static fire, fly to 60,000 ft [18,300 m] & back,” Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (Sept. 12). Full Story … Read more

Does Mars Have Hidden Underground Lakes?

Mars Lakes - NASA

Remnants of water once found on the surface of Mars may be hidden in a handful of small lakes below the Red Planet’s south pole, and more could exist, according to new research. For decades, researchers have suspected that water lurks below the polar icecaps of Mars, just as it does here on Earth. In 2018, scientists detected evidence for such a reservoir on the Red Planet — signs of a lake about 12 miles (19 kilometers) across and hidden below about a mile (1.5 km) of ice at the south pole of Mars. At the time, the researchers said … Read more

SPACE: Are There Huge Black Holes Out There?

black hole - pixabay

Black holes can get big … really big. But just how big? It’s possible they could top out at over a trillion times more massive than the sun. That’s 10 times bigger than the largest known black hole so far. But could these monsters truly exist in our universe? A team of researchers has come up with a plan to go hunting for them. And if they exist, they could help us solve the mysteries of how the first stars appeared in the cosmos. If you want to go shopping for black holes in the universe, unfortunately you only have … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Stellar

Two white dwarf stars orbiting each other in space.

White dwarf star remnants – because they aren’t actually stars, I found out – are the meat and potatoes of our cosmic stew. These guys are everywhere and they’re telling us so much about our reality. Even the weird ones give us more than any other universal body. I first ran into these interesting little bodies while on the hunt for a star that might host life beyond the type our Sun is. Cool bodies that don’t put off a lot of light, or bright tiny balls of heat looking to suck material from other stars, these husks give a … Read more