• 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…

  • What’s Going on at the International Space Station?

    It appears that we now have two problematic capsules attached to the International Space Station (ISS). Late last year, we learned about a liquid coolant lead in the Russian Soyuz Crew Return Vehicle (Soyuz MS-22 crew ship), and now we have a leak in the second Russian capsule as well (Progress 82 cargo capsule). This…

  • A Day in Astronomy: Discovery of Pluto

    On this day in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. The 23-year old astronomer was working for the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona at the time of his discovery. Pluto, recognized as the ninth planet in our solar system, was demoted to a dwarf planet in 2006 since it was one of many such objects in…

  • Space Stories: Black Holes & Dark Energy, New Forms of Ice, and Dark Dwarf Galaxies

    Here are some recent stories of interest. —University of Hawaii: “First Observational Evidence Linking Black Holes to Dark Energy“ Searching through existing data spanning 9 billion years, a team of researchers led by scientists at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has uncovered the first evidence of “cosmological coupling” –a newly predicted phenomenon in Einstein’s theory of…