With Voyager 1 data mystery, NASA relies on slow, long-distance conversation | Strawberry supermoon: Watch June's full moon online for free | Astra rocket fails during launch, 2 NASA satellites lost
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NASA's Voyager 1 team is trying to work out why the spacecraft appears to be confused about its location in space, but the mission's distance from Earth makes solving the issue challenging.
The Voyager 1 mission launched in 1977 with a design lifetime of five years. Nearly 45 years and a series of planetary flybys later, the spacecraft is now around 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, exploring interstellar space. The spacecraft has made countless discoveries, but has also suffered a number of anomalies and mysteries. The latest of these is junk telemetry data being sent back to Earth.
The full moon of June will shine bright next week, but if bad weather clouds your view, don't fret. You'll be able to see the Full Strawberry Moon in a live webcast for free.
The Virtual Telescope Project in Ceccano, Italy will host a free livestream of the full moon on Tuesday (June 14). The webcast, which will begin at 3:15 p.m. EDT (1915 GMT), will show live views of the full moon, the second supermoon of 2022, as it rises over Rome. Here's how.
An Astra rocket carrying two small hurricane-tracking satellites for NASA failed to reach orbit Sunday (June 12) after a major malfunction shortly after liftoff.
"We had a nominal first stage flight; however, the upper-stage engine did shut down early and we did not deliver our payloads to orbit," Astra's Amanda Durk Frye, senior manager for first stage and engine production, said during live launch commentary.
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NASA's first new moon rocket since the Apollo-era's mighty Saturn V is back on the launch pad for a critical fueling test this month and you can see live views right now for free.
The agency's first Space Launch System megarocket, which is scheduled to launch the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission to the moon in August, is on Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a three-day fueling test that will begin on June 18.
The main body of Europa Clipper is an aluminum cylinder that clocks in at 10 feet (3 meters) tall and 5 feet (1.5 m) wide. Fitted out with integrated electronics, cabling and propulsion system, the spacecraft body arrived at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California in early June.
"It's an exciting time for the whole project team and a huge milestone," Jordan Evans, the mission's project manager at JPL, said in a statement. "This delivery brings us one step closer to launch and the Europa Clipper science investigation."
The galaxy-mapping mission Gaia has detected thousands of stellar earthquakes that might provide new insights into the inner workings of stars.
The discovery is rather surprising as the spacecraft was not designed to do such work, Conny Aerts, an astronomer at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, said in a European Space Agency (ESA) press conference on Monday, June 13.
A spiral galaxy is curled up like a sleeping serpent in a striking new image from the European Southern Observatory's Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. or ALMA.
ALMA's high altitude of 16,500 feet (5,000 meters) and extremely dry climate in Chile's Atacama Desert provide an excellent vantage point for the observatory's 66 radio telescopes to penetrate the heavens.
Time crystals are bizarre structures of atoms, the existence of which was only predicted as recently as 2012, with experimental proof following a few years later. In a normal crystal, such as diamond or salt, the atoms are arranged in a regularly repeating spatial pattern — a lattice or similar framework. And like most materials, when the atoms are in their ground state — their lowest possible energy level — they stop jiggling.
Time crystals, on the other hand, consist of atoms that repeat in time rather than in space, oscillating back and forth, or spinning, even in their ground state. They can maintain this motion perpetually, without requiring an input of energy or losing energy in the process.
On June 19, Jupiter's moon Europa will block, or occult, a star as predicted using Europe's Gaia spacecraft. This event will be even more remarkable than the last - particularly to astronomers at the Paris Observatory, who are helping scientists at ESA prepare a mission to study Europa and neighboring moons.
"What makes the upcoming occultation of Europa special is that this moon will be in Jupiter's shadow at the time," agency officials wrote in a statement. "As Jupiter will be blocking that sunlight during the occultation, observers will only know Europa is there when it makes the star temporarily disappear."
Obi-Wan finally swings his lightsaber around and makes whooshing sounds as Darth Vader makes his return.
As you can imagine, episode 3 is all about Darth Vader's return and yes, we now know that James Earl Jones has reprised his role as the Dark Lord's menacing voice (with a little assistance from an AI). But although Obi-Wan and Vader finally cross laser swords, this probably isn't the rematch you've been hoping for.
