Watch Ingenuity Mars helicopter soar in amazing new videos from Perseverance rover | Astra aims to reach orbit for 1st time early Saturday: Watch it live | Space station astronauts resume normal operations after Russian anti-satellite missile test
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Stunning new videos show NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity soaring through the Red Planet skies like never before. Ingenuity performed its 13th Martian flight on Sept. 4, cruising through the rugged "Séítah" region of the Red Planet's Jezero Crater on a scouting mission for its robotic companion, NASA's Perseverance rover. During the 160-second flight, Ingenuity covered about 689 feet (210 meters) of horizontal distance, reached a maximum altitude of 26 feet (8 m) and performed a number of tricky maneuvers.
After a scrub early Friday, Astra is now aiming to reach orbit for the first time early Saturday morning (Nov. 20), and you can watch the action live. The Bay Area startup plans to send its Launch Vehicle 0007 (LV0007) skyward from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska's Kodiak Island during a window that opens at midnight EST (0500 GMT; 8 p.m. local Alaska time on Nov. 19).
Astronauts at the International Space Station have returned to normal operations after a couple of adrenalin-filled days following a Russian anti-satellite missile test that threw an out-of-control cloud of space debris into the station's orbit.
A small satellite will watch its robotic colleague smash into an asteroid, tracking the remarkable encounter and sending the footage back to Earth. NASA and international agencies are coming together in the name of planetary defense. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission led by the John Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is the first mission up for this project. If all goes as planned, NASA's DART spacecraft will launch early Wednesday (Nov. 24) to reach a pair of near-Earth asteroids late next year.
An experimental spacecraft testing solar sails as a means of cost-effective space propulsion that could power future missions to distant places is still riding the sunbeams in Earth's orbit more than two and a half years after its launch. The spacecraft, called LightSail 2, is a cubesat about the size of a loaf of bread but fitted with a solar sail the size of a boxing ring: It covers about 433 square feet (32 square meters). This sail captures incoming photons from the sun, just as a wind sail catches the moving air, to propel the spacecraft.
Later this month, NASA will launch a mission to smack an asteroid into a new orbit to prepare for the possibility that an asteroid in the future might threaten Earth. But don't worry, experts agree that there is no possibility that (even if it goes awry) this asteroid-smashing could threaten Earth.
In 2019 the Chang'e-4 lander and its Yutu-2 rover were the first human objects landed on the far side of the moon – the side that permanently faces away from Earth. This marked a pivotal milestone in planetary exploration, of equal importance to the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, when the far side of the moon was seen by humans for the first time.
Skywatchers across North America got a first class view of the longest partial lunar eclipse in nearly 600 years, though for some, frigid weather threatened to ruin the experience. The Beaver Moon lunar eclipse of 2021, which saw the moon 97% covered by Earth's shadow at its peak at 4:02 am EST (9:02 GMT), was potentially visible to millions of stargazers across North America, Central and South America, as well as parts of Australia, Europe and Asia.
Once again we are able to enjoy two "Star Trek" shows on our screens as the fourth season of "Star Trek: Discovery" dropped Thursday (Nov. 18) on the streaming service Paramount Plus. Entitled "Kobayashi Maru," the first season 4 episode of "Star Trek: Discovery" picks up not long after the third season ends. We know from the trailer shown at New York Comic Con back in October that a strange anomaly threatens the entire galaxy. Billions could be killed. With Federation and non-Federation worlds alike feeling the impact, they must confront the unknown and work together to ensure a hopeful future for all.
