• India Has Been Busy – It Now Heads for the Sun

    Over the weekend, India launched another important space mission. The mission of the Aditya-L1 spacecraft is to spend four months studying the outer layers of the Sun. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is overseeing the mission, which will come to rest at the L1 Lagrange point from where it will observe the Sun. For…

  • Space Quote: Has the JWST Changed Astronomy Forever?

    “Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong. It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a…

  • Video: More on the Importance of Exomoons

    If you watched my earlier post on Cool Worlds Lab’s missed opportunity on an exomoon proposal with the James Webb Space Telescope, then you will enjoy this updated video where Assistant Professor of Astronomy David Kipping provides five reasons that the study of exomoons is so important. I do not want to give too much…

  • 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: The new crew should be onboard the ISS tomorrow morning, bringing the number of occupants at the station to 11 until 4 crew members…