• Pic of the Week: The Rings of Neptune

    This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It clearly shows the rings of Neptune as well as a number of its moons (the image below is a broader shot labeling those moons). It is an impressive shot by the JWST within our solar system, similar to the space telescope’s recent image…

  • NASA News: An Eye on Hurricane Ian

    It may have been a bad week for NASA regarding the delayed launch of the Artemis I mission from Florida, but it has been a good week for NASA as it illustrates the benefits of monitoring Hurricane Ian as it crosses the Caribbean and heads towards Florida. Two NASA instruments on the International Space Station…

  • In Case You Missed It: Moons of Exomoons

    Hearing about the moonlet targeted by the DART spacecraft reminded me of a recent video discussing whether exomoons could have their own moons. It was a piece by Cool World Labs titled “Can Moons Have Moons?” It gets into the “Hill Sphere,” which is an astronomical body’s region in which it dominates the attraction of…

  • Space Stories: Enceladus, Maarten Schmidt, and SpaceX

    Here are some recent stories of interest. —Weather.com: “A Habitable Ocean? Scientists Believe An Essential Life Component May be Abundant on Saturn’s Icy Moon, Enceladus!“ Previously, NASA’s Saturn-studying Cassini spacecraft had discovered Enceladus’ subsurface liquid water as well as the plumes of ice grains and water vapour that erupted from cracks in the moon’s icy surface.…

  • RIP: Cosmonaut Valery Vladimirovich Polyakov

    Last week cosmonaut Valery Polyakov passed away at the age of 80 (1942 to 2022). He still holds the record for the longest single spaceflight in history when he was aboard the Mir space station for 437 days and 18 hours during one stay between 1994 and 1995. By the time he retired later in…

  • DART: Watch the Asteroid Impact

    The Americans and Italians are putting on a show tomorrow night. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft is ready to strike Dimorphos, which is a moonlet to the asteroid Didymos. All of it should be captured by Italy’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids (LICIACub) in addition to DART’s own camera called the Didymos…

  • Space Quote: Captain Kirk, The Singer

    “The Masked Singer is the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had. Well, I mean, the wardrobe was impossible. You can’t see, you can’t breathe, you can’t hear, you can’t think. There was no oxygen in there. I had a panic thinking, “Wait a minute, I can’t breathe. And I’m supposed to sing.” You know how you…

  • Artemis I Launch Set for September 27th

    This time of year the weather tends to be troublesome in the Florida region, but NASA still hopes to try again with its Artemis I uncrewed launch to the Moon on September 27th. Here are the updated mission facts: CNN reports that “Concerns over the weather system forming in the Caribbean put the weather conditions…

  • Pic of the Week: Interacting Galaxy Pair

    This week’s image comes again from the Hubble Space Telescope, which is keeping us entertained as the James Webb Space Telescope cycles through its required observations and spins off images from time to time. While an earlier image appeared to show colliding galaxies, though it was believed to be an optical illusion, the collision above…

  • Soyuz Launch to Space Station a Success

    Earlier today, the Russian Soyuz MS-22 rocket launched from Kazakhstan and successfully placed three new inhabitants on the International Space Station (ISS): NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin. The three will stay on the ISS for the next six month, while three cosmonauts will be returning to Earth next week…