Categories

Perseverance rover completes first AI-planned drive on Mars

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by the mission’s […]

As Rubin’s survey gets underway, simulations suggest it could find about six lunar-origin asteroids per year

Most near-Earth asteroids are thought to drift in from the main asteroid belt. But a small subset may have a much closer origin: the moon. One intriguing example is 469219 Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3), an Earth quasi-satellite whose reported spectrum resembles lunar material and which is a target of China’s Tianwen-2 sample-return mission.

Go to Source

[…]

NASA conducts vital tests ahead of slated Moon mission

NASA on Monday was conducting critical final tests ahead of setting a launch date for its first crewed flyby mission to the moon in more than half a century.

Go to Source

Europe observatory hails plan to abandon light-polluting Chile project

Europe’s ESO star-gazing organization on Monday welcomed plans to call off building a massive green energy project in the Chilean desert which threatened to spoil its telescopes’ view of the darkest skies on Earth.

Go to Source

Hubble sees galaxy with dark rings in new light

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features an uncommon galaxy with a striking appearance. NGC 7722 is a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

Go to Source

FAA dismisses airline, sonic boom concerns in signing off on SpaceX Starship plans from KSC

SpaceX’s path to launching its massive Starship rocket from Florida’s Space Coast passed another hurdle Friday after the Federal Aviation Administration released results of its nearly two-year long environmental review for launch plans from Kennedy Space Center.

Go to Source

Cracks on Europa sport traces of ammonia

The search for life-supporting worlds in the solar system includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it’s an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It’s heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. […]

SpaceX seeks FCC nod to build data center constellation in space

SpaceX is requesting permission to launch as many as 1 million satellites into the Earth’s orbit in order to pull off Elon Musk’s latest grand vision of putting data centers in space to do complex computing for artificial intelligence. In a filing with the Federal Communications Commission made on Jan. 30, SpaceX said it’s creating […]

NASA begins a practice countdown for its first moonshot with astronauts in more than 50 years

NASA began a two-day practice countdown Saturday leading up to the fueling of its new moon rocket, a crucial test that will determine when four astronauts blast off on a lunar flyby.

Go to Source

Powerful Milky Way stellar flares near black hole could refine galaxy center models

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighborhoods in our galaxy, and it’s just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These aren’t your […]

New 3D map of the sun’s magnetic interior could improve predictions of disruptive solar flares

For the first time, scientists have used satellite data to create a 3D map of the sun’s interior magnetic field, the fundamental driver of solar activity. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, should enable more accurate predictions of solar cycles and space weather that affects satellites and power grids.

Go to Source

[…]

Bezos’s Blue Origin to ‘pause’ space tourism to focus on moon efforts

Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin said Friday it would temporarily pause flights of its space tourism rocket to focus more resources on its lunar ambitions.

Go to Source

Puzzling slow radio pulses are coming from space. A new study could finally explain them

Cosmic radio pulses repeating every few minutes or hours, known as long-period transients, have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in 2022. Our new study, published in Nature Astronomy today, might finally add some clarity.

Go to Source

NASA delays the first Artemis moonshot with astronauts because of extreme cold at the launch site

NASA has delayed astronauts’ upcoming trip to the moon because of near-freezing temperatures expected at the launch site.

Go to Source

Why are Tatooine planets rare? General relativity explains why binary star systems rarely host planets

Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars—even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth.

Go to Source