Spacecraft & Probes
Japan Blasts Satellite Into Space To Deliver Artificial Meteor Shower
Japanese company blasted a rocket on Friday. It carried a satellite on a mission to deliver the world’s first artificial meteor shower. Astro Live Experiences (ALE), a Tokyo-based start-up has developed a micro-satellite which can create what it calls a “shooting stars on demand” service. So, engineers designed the...
Elon Musk Unveils SpaceX’s First Starship
SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk shares a photo of its Starship test flight rocket. The glorious rocket may one day carry people to the Moon and Mars. Musk tweeted an image on Thursday night of the completed Starship test-flight rocket from a SpaceX facility in south Texas. Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the...
TESS Discovers An Exoplanet 23 Times The Size Of Earth
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a third exoplanet outside our solar system. TESS has been hunting for three months now. The new planet, named HD 21749b, orbits a bright, nearby dwarf star about 53 light-years away, in the constellation Reticulum. It has the longest orbital period at...
SpaceX Moved its 1st Crew Dragon Spaceship on the Launch Pad
SpaceX is set for its first orbital test flight of Crew Dragon. The private company has moved its Dragon Spaceship to the launch pad. SpaceX has raised a Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A in Florida Thursday (Jan. 3). It’s been eight years since the last space...
China Successfully Lands on the Moon’s Far Side
China’s Chang’e 4 lands where no spacecraft has ever landed before. The probe immediately began taking photos of the surface of the Moon’s far side. Yesterday, Jan. 2, 2019 at 12 p.m. local time (8 p.m. PT), Chinese media announced that the nation’s Chang’e-4 lunar lander has successfully...
NASA Releases First Clear Picture of Ultima Thule
NASA finally reveals the ice world known as Ultima Thule. The icy world, 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman. So, after the historic flyby of a faraway world, Ultime Thule NASA just received a photo from their New Horizons spacecraft. The icy world turns out to be two objects joined together – a...
NASA Succeeds in Historic Flyby of Faraway World Ultima Thule
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made contact with Earth to confirm its successful flyby of the icy world, Ultima Thule. Thirty-three minutes into the new year, scientists, engineers celebrated the moment that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to a small, icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule....
NASA’s New Horizons Set For Historic Flyby of Distant World
NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft will ring in the new year by exploring the most distant and mysterious world ever studied. Astronomers call it Ultima Thule, meaning “beyond the known world.” The distant object is a frozen relic of the solar system some four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away. Ultima...
NASA’s Voyager 2 Spacecraft Has Entered Interstellar Space
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft has finally entered interstellar space. It is the second human-made object to do so, thus, joining its predecessor Voyager 1. According to NASA, Voyager 2 crossed over the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space, on November 5th. So, the probe is now more than...
China’s Rover Launches To Far Side of Moon
China launched its most ambitious robotic lunar mission to date early Saturday. The rover will land on the far side of the moon for the first time ever. The probe, Chang’e-4, is named after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology. The Chinese agency sent the Chang’e-4 combination static lander and rover into space atop a...