All posts tagged "Astronomy"

Cape Canaveral (AFP) - The first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spaceship was dramatically called off Saturday with just under four minutes left on the launch countdown clock, for reasons that aren't yet clear.

It was the second time the test mission to the International Space Station was scrubbed with the astronauts strapped in and ready to lift off, and yet another setback for the troubled program, which has already faced years of delays and safety scares.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are waiting to be safely removed from the capsule. Mission commander Wilmore had earlier given a short but rousing speech telling tens of thousands of people tuning into the live feed that "It's a great day to be proud of your nation."...

WASHINGTON — Auroras lit up skies across swaths of the planet for the second night in a row on Saturday, after already dazzling Earthlings from the United States to Tasmania to the Bahamas the day before.

A powerful solar storm -- which could continue into Sunday -- has triggered spectacular celestial shows usually confined to the far northern reaches of the planet, hence their nickname of the "northern lights."

"I have the sensation of living through a historic night in France... It was really charged, with solar particles and emotions," Eric Lagadec, an astrophysicist at the Observatoire de Cote d'Azur, wrote on social media after the first night....

Washington (AFP) - In a hushed room of a museum in Washington, cameras and cell phones focus on a tiny piece of rock, no larger than a piece of gravel. The fragment might seem insignificant, but it is a sample taken from the asteroid Bennu, which scientists are studying in the hope of discovering if asteroids actually brought the building blocks of life -- carbon and water -- to Earth. Exhibited to the public on Friday for the first time at the Smithsonian in the US capital, the tiny stone is just visible inside its small capsule.  "This asteroid, now we know, has water crystals and carbon, tw......

Washington (AFP) - NASA is set Wednesday to unveil a new image from the James Webb Space Telescope a year after it first stunned the world with breathtaking views of the distant cosmos. Webb, the most powerful observatory in orbit, was launched in December 2021 from French Guiana, on a million mile (1.6 million kilometer) voyage to a region called the second Lagrange point. Its first full color picture was revealed by President Joe Biden on July 11, 2022: the clearest view yet of the early universe, going back 13 billion years. The next wave included "mountains" and "valleys" of a star-forming......

Dark energy and dark matter are enigmatic concepts targeted by a European Space Agency space telescope named Euclid that launched from the Space Coast on Saturday. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 11:12 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 on the ESA mission that looks to send Euclid to a point nearly 1 million miles from Earth close to where the James Webb Space Telescope is parked in space. The first-stage booster for the flight made its second launch and made its recovery landing on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas downrange in the Atlantic Ocea......

In 2014, the first documented meteorite from outside our solar system struck Earth with a spectacular splash.

First detected by a satellite network designed to spot dangerous asteroids, the interstellar space rock exploded into a fireball above the Pacific Ocean.

Shards ranging in size from basketballs to marbles shattered as they plunged into the water at 1,680 miles per minute generating a massive steam cloud, and the subsequent shockwave buffeted an island 62 miles away.

The meteorite’s extreme speed — much faster than a near-Earth asteroid or comet — exposed its journey from somewhere potentially light years distant. ...