2032 asteroid impact chances just went up, but don't worry | Space Quiz! What region of the moon is believed to be rich in water ice? | This Week In Space: Episode 147 - Not As They Seem
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The odds of the asteroid 2024 YR4 impacting Earth in 2032 have increased to 1 in 43. Despite this, you still shouldn't worry about the potential impact of this asteroid. That's because experts expected the impact probability of this asteroid, which sits at the top of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies Sentry asteroid risk list, to increase. They also expect the chance of an impact to fall dramatically in the near future when we know more about its orbit.
On Episode 147 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik speak with Mick West, a passionate conspiracy debunker who, rather uniquely, proceeds with kindness and empathy as he unravels some of the key pseudoscience of our time.
SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink internet satellites from Florida's Space Coast on Saturday (Feb. 8). A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 21 Starlink spacecraft, including 13 with direct-to-cell capability, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Saturday, at 2:18 p.m. EST (1918 GMT).
The first humans to Mars might someday ride a rocket propelled by a nuclear reactor to their destination. But before that can happen, nuclear thermal propulsion technologies still have quite a way to go before we could blast astronauts through space on a nuclear rocket. Earlier this month, though, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems tested a new NTP reactor fuel at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, to find out if the fuel could function in the extreme conditions of space.
Thundering confidently into production this past week, Bandai Namco and Legendary's big-budget live-action "Gundam" movie is already assembling with recent news of the start of filming. This "Mobile Suit Gundam" project based on the insanely popular toy and anime line was originally revealed back in 2018, with Brian K. Vaughn reportedly set to write the script. It's been mostly radio silence ever since and fans were beginning to seriously doubt whether it would ever suit up for the silver screen.
On Feb. 10, 1958, scientists at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory bounced radar waves off of Venus. At the time, Venus was at a point in its orbit called inferior conjunction, where it is directly in between the Earth and the sun. Scientists beamed a radar signal toward Venus, which was about 28 million miles away at the time. It took about 5 minutes for the signal to bounce off of Venus and return to Earth. This was slightly shorter than they anticipated, which means that Venus was actually closer to Earth than scientists believed at the time.
