Enlarge / The crew of NS-20 view the New Shepard spacecraft and rocket prior to launch. (credit: Blue Origin) Welcome to Edition 4.37 of the Rocket Report! The big event this weekend is a wet dress rehearsal for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which begins on Friday and is presently scheduled to conclude on Sunday. […]
Enlarge / Firefighters from Stockton, California, put out flames off of Hidden Valley Rd. while fighting a wildfire, Friday, May 3, 2013 in Hidden Valley. (credit: Daria Devyatkina / Flickr) In the western United States, summer 2018 was a bad time for wildfires. In all, according to the government of California, 7,948 separate fires saw […]
Enlarge / A view of the tent as the rescuers found it on February 26, 1959. The tent had been cut open from inside, and most of the skiers had fled in socks or barefoot. (credit: Public Domain) In February 1959, nine young Russian hikers perished during a cross-country skiing trek through the northern Ural […]
Enlarge / The string of red dots represents the area of maximum magnification, with the location of Earendel indicated by the white arrow. (credit: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI) ) We don’t fully understand what the Universe’s first stars looked like. We know they must have formed from hydrogen and helium since […]
Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link) Of all the amazing and varied phenomena in the cosmological zoo, black holes are among the most mysterious. They are zombies—the all-devouring corpses of dead stars, made of trillions of tons of stellar ash compressed into an infinitely dense point called a “singularity.” […]
Enlarge / NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei flashes a thumbs-up shortly after landing on Wednesday. (credit: NASA) After more than a month of speculation, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei did in fact return to Earth inside a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday, on the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan. The landing of the small descent module was […]
Enlarge / Data from SARAO’s MeerKAT radio telescope data (green) showing the odd radio circles, is overlaid on optical and near infrared data from the Dark Energy Survey. (credit: J. English (U. Manitoba)/EMU/MeerKAT/DES(CTIO)) Astronomers have been puzzling over the nature and origin of rare, mysterious radio circles in space ever since the objects were first […]
Enlarge / A rendering of the star V Hydrae, or V Hya for short. In its death throes, the star emitted a series of expanding rings that scientists calculated are being formed every few hundred years, per UCLA astronomer Mark Morris. (credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)) Astronomers have caught a red giant star going through […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Over the last few decades, there’s been a heavy emphasis on techniques that fall under the concept of “proactive policing.” These generally involve identifying the areas of a city that have the highest crime rates and applying more aggressive policing in those locations. While there have been some successes, the approach […]
Enlarge / Impulse Space seeks to provide last-mile service for spacecraft launched into orbit. (credit: Impulse Space) Impulse Space announced Tuesday that it has raised $20 million in seed funding, led by the venture capital firm Founders Fund. The in-space propulsion company, started by noted rocket scientist Tom Mueller, plans to use the funding to […]