Month: December 2023

NASA on Monday announced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth – to send a high-definition cat video. The 15-second meow-vie featuring an orange tabby named Taters is the first to be streamed from deep space, and demonstrates it’s possible to transmit

China’s third test mission of a reusable, robotic spacecraft continues to invite speculation by casting into orbit half a dozen small objects, tentatively referred to as ‘wingmen’ by intrigued amateur skywatchers. Dubbed Shenlong – Chinese for “divine dragon” – the experimental orbital plane was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Thursday 14 December

While it has been a favorite disaster movie theme, nuking an incoming asteroid in the real world has been touted as a very bad idea. While a nuclear bomb could possibly obliterate a smaller asteroid, nuking a larger asteroid would only break it into pieces. Those pieces would still threaten our planet, and perhaps even

Most of the light streaming through our Universe is invisible to human eyes. The spectrum ranges from long radio waves to short gamma rays, with the visible part occupying just a tiny slice in the middle. But, thanks to telescope technology, we’re able to peer into other slices of the spectrum, and see all the

Every now and again, a reminder comes along that our planet really is unusual in so many fabulous ways. Those reminders don’t even have to come from far away – they can be as close as our next-door neighbor. Similar to Earth, Mars experiences moments where its moons cast shadows on its surface. But “eclipses”

A new ‘space race’ is heating up between the US and China in space exploration, and Lagrange points are emerging as a battleground. Named after the astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange, they are locations in interplanetary space where the gravitational pull of two celestial bodies (like the Earth and the Sun) balances the centripetal force needed for

Japan’s SLIM space probe entered the Moon‘s orbit on Monday in a major step towards the country’s first successful lunar landing, expected next month. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” because it is designed to land within 100 metres (328 feet) of a specific target on the lunar surface.

Arctic observers were granted a rare spectacle when rare rainbow-colored clouds streaked the skies ahead of the holiday season. A cold wave sweeping through the Arctic brought the rare polar stratospheric clouds within view for at least three days between December 18 and December 20, per the website spaceweather.com. Polar stratospheric cloud above Oslo, Norway.(Glenn

Java Stingarees are the first marine fish to be declared extinct as a result of human activity. This troubling news was released with the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) latest update of its Red List of Threatened Species last week, along with reports of escalating climate impacts on freshwater fishes presented at COP28.