• The Moon Has One More Crater

    If President Putin wanted to leave a mark, he has done so on the Moon. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has apparently located the spot where the Luna-25 spacecraft crashed, as shown in the before and after shot above. Given that craters can last for billions of years on the Moon’s surface, we can rest…

  • Pic of the Week: Hurricane Idalia Over Florida

    The image above showing Idalia hitting Florida was captured from the International Space Station on August 30, 2023. Here is the full explanation about the image from the site: An astronaut on the International Space Station used a handheld camera to capture the second photo (below) at 10:44 a.m. Eastern Time (14:44 Universal Time) on…

  • What Will the JWST Peer At Next?

    If you are wondering where the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be looking in the future, some of that is known and some has yet to be determined. The approved targets of the space telescope can be found at the Programmatic Categories of JWST Science Observations site. The site breaks the approved targets into…

  • Is Musk Still an Asset, or is He Becoming a Liability?

    Last week, The Wall Street Journal had a good story on Elon Musk titled “Elon Musk’s Latest Antics Have Some Asking: Is He Out of Touch?” It discuses his frat-like behavior challenging Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to a fight, his strange behavior at Twitter, and the shrinking set of friends and colleagues able to keep him…

  • Space Stories: New Horizon Questions, A Dark Spot on Neptune, and Prioritizing Exoplanets

    Here are some recent stories of interest. —Space.com : “NASA’s New Horizons Mission Faces an Uncertain Future (op-ed)“ With its budget being trimmed for 2024, NASA is making some weighty decisions… and one includes drastically trimming New Horizons funds by replacing the current science staff with a new team in an effort to save about $3 million—a rounding error in terms…

  • Space Quote: The Changing Competition in Space and Elsewhere

    “…a comparison with India is illuminating: India’s economy was about half the size of Russia’s when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Today, India’s economy is 50 percent bigger than Russia’s. Forget about keeping pace with the United States: Russia can’t keep up with India.” -Editorial in The Washington Post by David Von Drehle…

  • A New Crew Departs for the ISS

    A new crew departed Earth for the International Space Station (ISS) at 3:27am ET today from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew includes: NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.…

  • A Day in Astronomy: Launch of the Spitzer Space Telescope

    On this day in 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope to conduct infrared astronomy. Spitzer continued to operate until January of 2020. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noted some of the triumphs of the space telescope, including: revealing a system of seven Earth-size planets around a star 40 light-years away; creating an unprecedented map of the Milky…

  • Pic of the Week: Another View of the Far Side of the Moon

    This week’s image is an shot of the far side of the Moon captured by India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which landed on the Moon yesterday. This was part of a set of photos posted to Twitter by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The various images were used by the spacecraft as it attempted to find…

  • “India Is on the Moon”

    Now that is a clear message from S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed on the lunar surface at  8:34 am ET today. India is now the fourth nation to land on the moon, not that other nations haven’t tried. This victory is all the sweeter following Russia’s…