Astronomy (RSS)

A team led by NASA in Utah’s West Desert is in the final stages of preparing for the arrival of the first U.S. asteroid sample – slated to land on Earth in September.

NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has awarded four contracts to conduct NOAA’s Sounder for Microwave-Based Applications (SMBA) Phase-A study.

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of photographing the full super moon

Here’s when to see the ‘super blue moon’ this week Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

With a ‘blue’ moon rising tonight, the second supermoon of August 2023, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try to get an Instagram-worthy photograph, but unfortunately getting a great photo of the full moon is really challenging. Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

Why isn't spiral galaxy

There are several reasonable ways to protect Earth from any potential asteroid threats, but in this episode of Dead Planets Society, reason loses out to the idea of a huge orbiting shield

The six-wheeled Pragyan rover had to change course to avoid a 4-metre-wide crater on the surface of the moon, as the Vikram lander has returned temperature readings from the lunar surface

ESA’s JUICE mission will help us better understand whether Jupiter’s icy moons are habitable. But we need to be open to their unexpected secrets, says principal investigator Michele Dougherty

La NASA ha lanzado un nuevo sitio web en español para invitar al público a enviar sus nombres a bordo de Europa Clipper, una misión que iniciará su viaje a la luna de Júpiter Europa en octubre de 2024. Este nuevo sitio web forma parte de una campaña de la agencia llamada “Mensaje en una botella”, mediante la cual un poema original dedicado a Europa

An object in the Kuiper belt named 2002 MS4 has a depression 45 kilometres deep and 320 kilometres across, unlike anything seen before on such a small world

Look through the cosmic cloud cataloged as NGC 281

Guardian Australia picture editor Carly Earl explains the dos and don’ts of photographing the full super moon

Here’s when to see the ‘super blue moon’ this week Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast

With a blue moon rising this week, the second supermoon of August 2023, many people will pull out their mobile phones to try to get an Instagram-worthy photograph, but unfortunately getting a great photo of the full super moon is really challenging. Two reasons: it is very far away and unless you have a telephoto lens (which makes the moon appear closer than it is) it will always appear as a very small glowing dot in the frame. Continue reading...

The supermassive black holes at the centre of many galaxies were suspected to quench the formation of new stars – now the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted evidence of this

In today’s newsletter: The country’s lunar landing was a triumph. This is how it quietly built a successful mission • Sign up here for our daily newsletter, First Edition Good morning. Last week India became the fourth ever country to land a spacecraft on the moon, and the first to touch down successfully near its south pole. It was hailed as a success for “budget” missions, with the project costing £60m, less than half of the £131m it cost Christopher Nolan to make his 2014 space epic, Interstellar. Continue reading...

Beyond the Light, an exhibition developed in a collaboration between the Artechouse gallery in New York and Nasa, explores the universe through immersive technology-driven art. It includes newly analysed data from the James Webb space telescope Continue reading...

Diffuse starlight and dark nebulae

Lunar spectacle also qualifies as a blue moon by some definitions The second full moon of the month occurs this week. The first took place on 1 August, but this second coming will grace the skies on 31 August. Because it is the second full supermoon in the month, it is also called a blue moon – although definitions for blue moons vary. The above definition is known as a monthly blue moon but some prefer what is known as a seasonal blue moon. This is the third full moon in a season that contains four full moons – so the blue moon may not be the second of the month. Continue reading...

For the average Indian, national self-confidence is the real reward from the Chandrayaan-3 landing “I let out an involuntary whoop when it landed,” my friend Shivansh told me. He was travelling on London Underground at the time. “Everyone on the tube was staring at me.” Shivansh is just one of millions of Indians all over the world who are celebrating the successful landing of the Chandrayaan-3 lunar exploration mission. Indians even broke YouTube’s record for livestreams, with more than 8 million people staying glued to their screens last Wednesday, as the spacecraft edged close to the lunar surface. The excitement is understandable, especially considering the fact that just four years ago, the preceding Chandrayaan lander crashed into the moon after a software glitch. Continue reading...

Fifty years after the UK sent its first satellite into space, a Scottish town is among rivals vying for another shot A large band of battered metal has been placed on a stand at the entrance of Skyrora’s rocket manufacturing hall in Cumbernauld in central Scotland. Six feet in diameter, the loop is perforated, torn and twisted, a result of being blasted into space and then dropped on to the Australian outback where it has lain for almost 50 years until its recent recovery. The ring is part of the remains of Britain’s only satellite launch, which took place on 28 October 1971 when a Black Arrow rocket placed a Prospero probe into orbit round the Earth. The programme was cancelled the same year. Continue reading...

Crescents of Venus

SpaceX has successfully launched its Dragon spacecraft with four crew members onboard from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The international crew includes the Nasa astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, the European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and the Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov. The launch of Crew-7, as the mission is called, was originally scheduled for Thursday but was halted by Nasa and SpaceX to deal with lingering issues, according to officials. The spacecraft is due to reach the International Space Station on Sunday

Four astronauts from four countries take off to International Space Station

Continue reading...

The Harvard scientist on his search for alien technology, academic jealousy and why we must fund space exploration Abraham Loeb, known as Avi, is a professor of astrophysics at Harvard University and he has done the unthinkable. He has repeatedly been willing to contemplate the existence of nonhuman technology and how it may explain certain perplexing astronomical observations that mainstream science struggles with. Loeb, 61, is the author of Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future Beyond Earth, a follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth. On the day we spoke, the US government was preparing to hold a House of Representatives oversight and accountability committee hearing on UFOs with retired air force officer and former intelligence official David Grusch, who turned whistleblower in June, claiming that the US government had retrieved pieces of crashed alien spacecraft. When it comes to UFOs, why is it always a government cover-up? Why don’t astronomers see UFOs – aren’t they the people looking at the sky the most? The government would be a natural first to recognise anything unusual in the sky or in crash sites because their day job is to worry about national security and to monitor the nearby environment. Astronomers always train their telescopes on very distant, slow-moving objects. They are not looking for anything fast-moving or nearby. So it’s possible that if anything unusual happened, the US government would notice it first. Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future Beyond Earth by Avi Loeb is published by John Murray (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...

On the ISS, astronauts from Russia and the west share a craft the size of a large family home. So what happened when Moscow started a conflict 250 miles below on Earth? One evening in January 2015, Terry Virts, a Nasa astronaut onboard the International Space Station (ISS), decided to pop over to the Russian quarters, catch up with his Russian colleagues and check out the view. For views, nothing beats the space station. From this orbiting perch approximately 250 miles (400km) above the Earth, scores of astronauts have waxed lyrical about the beauty of our planet: its mesmerising, fast-motion sunrises and sunsets, its brilliant colours and startling fragility. As a 47-year-old former space shuttle pilot, then on his second visit to the space station, Virts had experienced all of this himself and would do so many times again. But this night would be different. Continue reading...

An international crew of four representing four countries is in orbit following a successful launch to the International Space Station at 3:27 a.m. EDT Saturday, Aug. 26, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The agency’s SpaceX Crew-7 mission is the seventh commercial crew rotation mission for NASA.

A Season of Saturn

This record of our existence is now gliding through space, way beyond our solar system – we may as well forget about it, writes Antony Barlow Joel Snape’s article (Super-intelligent aliens are going to destroy humanity? Whatever, 23 August) raises the possibility of malevolent aliens. The great Carl Sagan posited that if alien life did exist and came to visit Earth, they would almost certainly be friendly, because based on our own destructive course, which is more than likely to end in our extinction, it is likely that the aliens would have survived having discovered the art of coexistence. Continue reading...