We’ve Never Been Closer to Finding Life Outside Our Solar System

In 2025, we might detect the first signs of life outside our solar system. Crucial to this potential breakthrough is the 6.5-meter-diameter James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou, a coastal town in French Guiana, in 2021, the JWST is our biggest space telescope to date. Since it began collecting […]

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The End Is Near for NASA’s Voyager Probes

Saturn as captured by the Voyager program. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images Once the Voyagers’ planetary journeys were over, it was possible to begin a new mission phase. After their last planetary stops, both probes reached escape velocity for the solar system, allowing them to be released from the sun’s gravity. Since 2012 for Voyager 1, and […]

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China’s New Heavy Lift Rocket Looks a Whole Lot Like SpaceX’s Starship

When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country’s first super heavy-lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides. Since then, China has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, […]

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NASA Will Do Space in Style With the Prada Axiom Spacesuit

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. “We are witnessing the beginning of a new era, as the internet was in the 1980s. Today access to space is still something for the few, but just as in computing, in a few years prices will come down. Everyone should indulge […]

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SpaceX’s Dramatic Rocket Catch Brings Interplanetary Travel One Step Closer

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. SpaceX has reached an important milestone in testing Starship, the spacecraft it wants to use for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars. Following a test launch yesterday, the Super Heavy booster that launches Starship returned to Earth and landed at its […]

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An International Space Station Leak Is Getting Worse—and Keeping NASA Up at Night

US space officials do not like to talk about the perils of flying astronauts on the aging International Space Station, elements of which are now more than a quarter of a century old. However, a new report confirms that NASA managers responsible for operating the space station are seriously concerned about a small Russian part […]

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The Polaris Dawn Spaceflight Was More Than Just a Billionaire Joyride

A white spacecraft, lightly toasted like a marshmallow and smelling of singed metal, fell out of the night sky early on Sunday morning and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico not all that far from Key West. The darkened waters there were carefully chosen from among dozens of potential landing spots near Florida. This […]

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Stephen Hawking Was Wrong—Extremal Black Holes Are Possible

Now two mathematicians have proved Hawking and his colleagues wrong. The new work—contained in a pair of recent papers by Christoph Kehle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ryan Unger of Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley—demonstrates that there is nothing in our known laws of physics to prevent the formation of an extremal black hole. Their mathematical proof […]

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How to View the ‘Comet of the Century’ C/2023 A3

This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish. C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan–ATLAS and considered “the comet of the century,” will appear in all its splendor in our sky during September and October 2024. Due to its characteristics, astronomers believe it will be exceptionally bright, similar to Halley’s […]

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Billionaire Finally Launches on First Private Space-Walk Mission

One of the most ambitious space tourism missions in history has launched, with the all-commercial crew set to hit a number of milestones during its five days in space, including the first-ever privately funded human space walk. The mission, called Polaris Dawn, took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today, Tuesday, September 10, […]

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Alien Spaceships Could Be Detected Using Gravitational Waves

You could say that this is exactly what Isaac Newton’s picture of gravity does—giving a relation between an object’s mass and the gravitational force it exerts. And you would be right. But the concept of space-time curvature gives rise to a much richer range of phenomena than a simple force. It allows a kind of […]

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The Biggest Controversy in Cosmology Just Got Bigger

(With any method, the physicists must deduce the absolute distance of at least one “anchor” galaxy in order to calibrate the whole scale. For their anchor, Riess, Freedman and other groups use an unusual nearby galaxy whose absolute distance has been determined geometrically through a parallax-like effect.) Using TRGBs as distance indicators is more complex […]

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Moon GPS Is Coming

“I refer to LunaNet as the big umbrella,” Gramling says. “It is an architecture that defines the standards that are going to be used for interoperable communications and position, navigation, and timing services. There’s a large effort underway to define those standards and document those in a LunaNet interoperability specification.” “It’s a very different paradigm […]

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Strange Noises Are Coming from Inside Boeing’s Starliner Spacecraft

On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft. “I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.” Wilmore said he was […]

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Scientists Plan ‘Doomsday’ Vault on Moon

Thanga and his team have sketched a system that would use solar panels and batteries to provide the power to push temperatures inside a lava tube down to the deep freeze needed to create their lunar ark. This is the defining difference between Thanga’s design and Hagedorn’s thought experiment. Where Thanga’s group would aim to […]

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John McFall, the Astronaut Flag Bearer at the Paris Paralympics, Is Ready to Fly

At first we studied how my disabilities and prosthesis might affect my ability to meet the requirements in-flight. At a later stage we went into detail, to the point of figuring out, for example, whether I should compulsorily use my prosthesis in space, since legs are hardly used there. In summary, I can say that […]

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