• Space Stories: SpaceX ISS Launch, Israeli Space Telescope, and Japanese Asteroid Results

    Here are some recent stories of interest. —Reuters News: “SpaceX Ready to Retry Launching NASA’s Next Space Station Crew“ Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX was ready to try again at sending NASA’s next long-duration crew of the International Space Station to orbit on Thursday, about 72 hours after a first attempt was scrubbed due to a…

  • Space Mission: IBEX is Not Communicating with NASA

    NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is having some problems. On February 18, the IBEX flight computer reset itself and placed the spacecraft into contingency mode. This is not good for it ongoing mission to map the boundary of our solar system. The spacecraft’s system should do a full reset again in a few days, so NASA…

  • Traffic Delays: SpaceX Aborts Crewed Mission to ISS

    Today’s SpaceX launch of a four-man crew to the International Space Station (ISS) has been delayed. Just three minutes before the planned launch of the Crew-6 mission, designed to carry astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, and Emerati astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, SpaceX experienced  a problem with the engine igniter fluid. The…

  • Continued Traffic to the International Space Station

    Yesterday, Russia’s M-23 capsule has safely arrived at the International Space Station (ISS). It was carrying supplies but no crew. Now the M-22 crew has a safe way to return to Earth when the are ready. And tomorrow, SpaceX is preparing to launch a new crew to the ISS: SpaceX and NASA are targeting no…

  • Massive Galaxies Stump Astronomers

    I was reading the recent news that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) astonished astronomers again. We continue to get big benefits from this relatively new distant telescope. The latest news involves massive compact galaxies that should not be there if our theories about galaxy formation are valid. The researchers behind this latest finding state…

  • The Rescue Mission to the ISS has Started

    Yesterday, Russia launched the uncrewed Soyuz M-23 mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (it was actually “today” in Russian time). The spacecraft will replace the damaged M-22 capsule attached to the International Space Station (ISS).  As a result, the earlier M-22 crew of Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank…

  • Pic of the Week: Globular Cluster M92

    This week’s image was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and shows globular cluster M92 located about 27,000 light-years away within our Milky Way galaxy. Here is a little more on the image from NASA: Detail of the globular cluster M92 captured by Webb’s NIRCam instrument. This field of view covers the lower…

  • Space Stories: Stalled Martian Rover, Early Mega-Galaxies, and Soviet Space Debris

    Here are some recent stories of interest. —SpaceNews: “NASA Mars Orbiter Reveals China’s Zhurong Rover Has Not Moved for Months“ Images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal that China’s Zhurong rover remains stationary on the Red Planet as China remains silent on the status of its spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard…

  • Podcast: Assist UCLA with a SETI Project

    I found another episode from The Planetary Society’s podcast Planetary Radio that is worth checking out. In this episode, Are we Alone? The Search for Alien Technosignatures, Professor Jean-Luc Margot and doctoral student Megan Li discuss their project at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) to identify signals from other civilizations in the galaxy and then extract information encoded in…

  • Television: UFOs and Star Trek

    With all the ongoing media chatter about unidentified flying objects (UFO), National Geographic has perfect timing with its new series UFOs: Investigating the Unknown. The new series started on February 13th. You can watch it on Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+. National Geographic promises that this new five-part series will explore the government’s decades long investigations…