Since the International Space Station (ISS) went into service in 2000, astronauts and cosmonauts have been on the planet continuously, flying around the Earth every 90 minutes. Throughout its existence, the floating laboratory has been a crucible for scientific experiments, long-term space exploration research and international collaboration. So far, 280 astronauts have traveled to the … Read more
Enlarge / Four kerosene-fueled Reaver engines power the Firefly Alpha rocket from the launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Welcome to Issue 7.01 of the Rocket Report! We’re putting this week’s report together a day later than usual because of the Independence Day holiday. Ars is entering its seventh year of publishing … Read more
NASA’s Goldstone planetary radar system recently detected two near-Earth asteroids, 2024 MK and 2011 UL21, flying past our planet. Perhaps a little alarmingly, one was only discovered 13 days ago before safely bypassing Soilbut scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California assure that it never posed a threat. Still, the images they … Read more
NASA has issued a warning about a major celestial event taking place today. A huge asteroidsimilar in mate to a towering skyscraper, hurtles towards the Earth at an astonishing speed speedThis event has caught the attention of astronomers and space enthusiasts around the world, as it highlights the continued need to keep an eye on … Read more
Last week, Earth was treated to a rare event: not one, but two large asteroids passing within earshot. Neither 2024 MK nor 2011 UL21, as the asteroids are known, came close enough to pose a threat, but both were within range of radar systems, so NASA got a few happy snapshots to mark the occasion. … Read more
NASA’s Viking was the first American spacecraft to land on Mars, sending back images of craters, massive volcanoes and giant canyons from its surface. In the 1970s, NASA launched two identical robots — Viking 1 and Viking 2, each equipped with landers and orbiters — to the Red Planet. After the mission, NASA reported that … Read more
On June 27, asteroid 2011 UL21 passed relatively close to Earth, flying past our planet at a distance of 6.6 million kilometers (4.1 million miles), which is about 17 times the average distance from Earth to the Moon. While it wasn’t close enough to worry about, the encounter gave astronomers a chance to get a … Read more
Updated at 8:25 p.m. Eastern Time with a post-launch statement. TOKYO — Firefly Aerospace has launched eight cubesats into orbit in a mission funded by NASA, the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage failure more than six months ago. The Alpha rocket lifted off at 12:04 a.m. Eastern Time on … Read more
There are many ways our civilization can come to an abrupt end, but only a handful of them involve forces so powerful and beyond our control that they are impossible to stop. An asteroid impact is one of those world-ending events that we have absolutely no defense against, and the more we try to avoid … Read more
The closer you look at the universe, the more mysterious it seems. NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission recently revealed bizarre C- and X-shaped structures floating in the electrified layer of the ionosphere. “Who knew Earth’s upper atmosphere was like alphabet soup?” NASA wrote about the sighting on its website. The … Read more