• Space Quote: Drone Flights Over Military Locations Said to be Common

    “…there have been a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere, including within restricted air space. Such sightings near or over Department of Defense installations are not new. The Department of Defense takes unauthorized access over its airspace seriously and coordinates closely with federal, state, and local…

  • A Day in Astronomy: The Birth of Philip K. Dick

    On this day in 1928, American science fiction writer Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago, IL. He would go on to write some of the best known books on science fiction, including: The Man in the High Castle (1963), which won the Hugo Award; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), later made into…

  • More Gift Ideas from The Mars Society

    If you are still fishing around for holiday gifts, you might want to check out The Mars Society’s gift store. For example, you may want a model of the Mars Perseverance rover and its accompanying Ingenuity helicopter (shown above) or may a signed copy of Robert Zubrin’s book The Case for Mars: The Plan to…

  • Additional Comments by the NASA Nominee

    According to a story in Chron, a few years back the current nominee for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, made the following statement: I truly want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people are jumping in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the…

  • UFOs in New Jersey?

    What’s going on in New Jersey and other parts of the East Coast? We are hearing of mysterious drone flights over communities and military installations, which the government cannot confirm. Earlier this week, New Jersey State Senator Jon Bramnick stated: The State of New Jersey should issue a limited state of emergency banning all drones…

  • Pic of the Week: Grand Design Spiral Galaxy NGC 5643

    This week’s image comes from the NASA/European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope. It shows colorful spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is located roughly 40 million light-years away in the constellation Lupus. Here is more on the spiral galaxy from the ESA Hubble site: NGC 5643 is what’s known as a grand design spiral, referring…

  • Space Quote: The End of Ingenuity on Mars

    “When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses…While multiple scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one we believe is most likely: Lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with.” -Statement by Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip…

  • Starship: To Mars or in the Service of Mars

    While Elon Musk has talked endlessly about going to Mars with his Starship, it seems the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in the service of Mars, God of War, has other ideas for his rocket. A recent Washington Post article, “Elon Musk’s Martian Dreams are a Boon to the U.S. military,” stated that DOD is…

  • Space Stories: Classifying Supernovae, Non-Water Liquid on Mars, and Understanding Exoplanet Atmospheres

    Here are some recent stories of interest. —Caltech: “Zwicky Transient Facility Leads to Classification of 10,000 Supernovae“ Fast forward to now, and Zwicky’s namesake, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)—a National Science Foundation-funded sky survey that began operations in 2017 using the 48-inch telescope—has detected about a hundred thousand supernovae. These detections, in turn, have led to…

  • Space Quote: SLS or Bust

    “Are they going to axe Artemis and insert the Starship? First of all, there is one human-rated spacecraft that is flying and has already flown beyond the moon, farther than any other human-rated spacecraft, and that’s the SLS combined with Orion.” -Statement by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the agency’s press conference last week at…