SpaceX Dragon splashes down off Florida coast with nearly 5,000 pounds of science on board | James Webb Space Telescope arrives at new home in space | Watch Perseverance Mars rover spit out a stuck rock after choking on sample
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SpaceX's latest cargo mission is back on Earth with a huge haul of science experiments on board. The Dragon CRS-24 cargo ship splashed down today (Jan. 24) in the Atlantic Ocean at 4:05 p.m. EST (2105 GMT), off the coast of Florida near Panama City.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reached its final destination today (Jan. 24). Since its successful Christmas Day launch, the $10 billion telescope has been busy deploying its various systems and structures and traveling over 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) to its new home: L2.
NASA's Perseverance rover managed to spit out pieces of rock that had been blocking its Mars-sampling gear since late December. Although the un-choking procedure hadn't been previously tested, the engineers on the Mars mission found it was rather "straightforward," the team said in an earlier blog post. It involved pointing the drill containing a clogged test tube to the ground and rotating it at speed until the rocks fell out.
In a recent scene familiar to many, even those not well-versed in the discipline, a researcher marked off square areas in order to catalog the layers of contents buried within. These "test pits," which were similar to the squares made at the sites of ancient cities and bygone civilizations, were based on a basic technique practiced by archaeologists. Only this time, the researcher was an astronaut and the "dig sites" were on board the International Space Station.
Our dating assumptions for the Red Planet might need a second look. Fresh analysis of craters on Mars suggests that asteroids have been smashing into the surface at a consistent rate for at least 600 million years.
On Oct. 19, 2017, Robert Weryk, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, spotted an intriguing new object with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS1) in Hawaii. The strange object, later dubbed 'Ouamuamua, was the first known interstellar object to visit the solar system. But astronomers were able to observe the odd visitor for only 11 days before it appeared too small and too dim to be detected. Considering the scant information obtained from such a short observation window, the true nature of 'Ouamuamua remains a mystery, even today.
The Earth seems to inhale and exhale in a new animation that shows how carbon is taken up and released as the seasons change. The animated continents seem to deflate during summertimes, indicating times and places where vegetation is growing and plants are sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When it's winter, the continents seem to inflate, indicating that vegetation is dying off and carbon is being released.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) just upgraded the software it uses to assess potentially hazardous asteroids to account for sunlight's affect on orbits, among other changes. While there are no immediate known space rock hazards to Earth despite decades of careful searching, astronomers continue to scan the skies, just in case. The new impact monitoring algorithm, called Sentry-II, upgrades software in use for 20 years.
Best Buy is hosting a 24-hour flash sale on the company's website, and the discounts extend to some cool Star Wars products. The sale ends at 3 a.m. EST (2000 GMT) tonight, so if you're after a cool new Lego Star Wars set like the Imperial Probe Droid (was $59.99now $47.99) or a 12-inch remote control plush of Baby Yoda (was $64.99now $44.99) then now is the time to get it.
New York-based director Michael Krivicka is a guy whose expertise in creating award-winning tie-in prank videos for corporate clients has become legendary over the last few years. After the success of their "Sweet Tooth" stunt last year, Netflix reached out to Krivicka's company with a new gig for December's big-budget disaster spoof starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep, "Don't Look Up." They challenged the notorious jester and his team to create a next-level hidden camera short that would take the movie's comet threat theme and insert it into a real-life context for unsuspecting folks back in the Big Apple.
