On June 30th, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Chris Williams — assisted by Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jenni Gibbons in Mission Control, best known for being lunar flyby Capcom during Artemis 2 — ventured on a rare spacewalk outside the ISS to help Canadarm2. Something in one of its joints broke in May, requiring them to use one of the orbital spares handily stashed on board for a replacement.
The original Earthrise photograph had an impact that almost transcended the Apollo missions themselves. It wasn’t the first picture of Earth taken from space, but those taken before it had largely gone unnoticed by the public. When Earthrise was taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve of 1968, it became a call to arms for the burgeoning environmental movement and offered a new way of looking at the world geopolitically. Earthrise showed a world without borders, transcending nationalism to spell out how we all live on this one planet, alone in space, and that we must work together in sharing and protecting our limited resources if we are to survive. Will the Artemis II Earthset photo have a similar impact?
On June 30th, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Chris Williams — assisted by Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jenni Gibbons in Mission Control, best known for being lunar flyby Capcom during Artemis 2 — ventured on a rare spacewalk outside the ISS to help Canadarm2. Something in one of its joints broke in May, requiring them to use one of the orbital spares handily stashed on board for a replacement.
The original Earthrise photograph had an impact that almost transcended the Apollo missions themselves. It wasn’t the first picture of Earth taken from space, but those taken before it had largely gone unnoticed by the public. When Earthrise was taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve of 1968, it became a call to arms for the burgeoning environmental movement and offered a new way of looking at the world geopolitically. Earthrise showed a world without borders, transcending nationalism to spell out how we all live on this one planet, alone in space, and that we must work together in sharing and protecting our limited resources if we are to survive. Will the Artemis II Earthset photo have a similar impact?
Is Jupiter’s icy moon actually a water-pluming world, or were years of Hubble observations showing us something else?
A mysterious group of Russian satellites are maneuvering near satellites operated by the private company ICEYE and used by Ukraine to monitor battlefield activity. Why?
The growing amount of debris burning up in the atmosphere worries scientists. The materials that satellites are made of are mostly alien to the atmosphere, not present in meteorites, and risk altering the planet’s already fragile climate. Aluminum, for one, turns into aluminum oxide when burnt. That substance is known to hasten ozone depletion. It also reflects sunlight, potentially causing a decrease in temperatures in the upper atmosphere.
Trans-Neptunian objects occasionally pass in front of background stars from our perspective on Earth. The transient alignment creates a miniature eclipse called a stellar occultation. Over the past decade, astronomers have dramatically improved their predictions of these fleeting events. During an occultation, a tiny shadow is cast on Earth that can briefly expose never-before-seen features about the enigmatic bodies of the outer solar system to observers in its path.