SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket aces record 13th flight in Starlink satellite launch | 'The Color of Space': Watch NASA's new documentary celebrating Black astronauts | Rare 5-planet alignment comes into better view this weekend
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SpaceX launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets for the 13th time today (June 17), setting a new reuse record.
The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida today at 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT), carrying 53 of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites to orbit. It was the first of three rocket launches in three days from three different pads that SpaceX plans to pull off.
A new NASA documentary featuring the achievements of numerous Black astronauts will premiere Sunday (June 19), during Juneteenth.
The 50-minute documentary, entitled "The Color Of Space," will be available to watch starting at 12 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT). You can catch it in the video above, or on NASA TV, the NASA app, NASA social media channels, and the agency's website.
A rare parade of planets is coming into better view in the second half of June, and even the moon will join the show.
The current early-evening sky is completely devoid of any of the five bright planets you can see with the naked eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). You have to wait until the second half of the night to see any of them, and then they will slowly come into view, one by one, and just before sunrise, all five will be stretched out across the southern and eastern sky.
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We now know who will get to take Boeing's Starliner capsule out for its first crewed test ride.
NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Suni Williams will fly on Crew Flight Test, Starliner's first crewed mission to the International Space Station, the agency announced Thursday. Wilmore will command the mission, with Williams serving as pilot and fellow NASA astronaut Mike Fincke training as backup pilot.
The moon floats just above Earth's life-giving atmosphere in a gorgeous photo snapped from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins.
"As beautiful as the Earth is, I can't seem to take my eyes off of the moon. Every moonset on @Space_Station brings us one step closer to earthrise on the moon as we conduct scientific research and develop new technologies that will help pave the way to the lunar surface," Watkins wrote in a June 9 Twitter post that featured the amazing moon photo.
A large wildfire in Arizona is seriously threatening a key site for astronomy. Kitt Peak National Observatory, in the southern part of the state, includes more than two dozen telescopes and has hosted astronomers for more than six decades.
But now the site is facing the Contreras Fire, which began on June 11 and has been steadily growing due to high winds and lots of dry vegetation.
A comet visiting the sun has disintegrated in front of astronomers' eyes in a series of unprecedented observations that may help explain why comets orbiting close to the sun seem to disappear.
The comet, called 323P/SOHO, was discovered in 1999 by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a NASA/European Space Agency probe that constantly observes the sun.
SpaceX has fired some of the employees involved in drafting and distributing within the company a letter criticizing the behavior of founder and CEO Elon Musk, according to media reports.
The letter was posted on an internal SpaceX Microsoft Teams channel that reaches more than 2,600 employees, The Verge reported yesterday. It decries Musk's behavior on Twitter and in other public forums as "a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks."
The private spaceflight company aims to launch three rockets from three different launch pads in three days starting on Friday (June 17), when SpaceX will loft 53 Starlink internet satellites into orbit from Pad 39A of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A launch from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base will follow on Saturday morning to orbit a radar satellite for the German military, with the third mission returning to Florida to launch a commercial communications satellite from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Chinese scientists' claims that their "Sky Eye" telescope could have picked up signals from intelligent aliens have been met with skepticism by an American colleague.
Dan Werthimer, a Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) researcher at the University of Berkeley, California and a coauthor on the research project which first spotted the signals, told Live Science that the narrow-band radio signals he and his fellow researchers found "are from [human] radio interference, and not from extraterrestrials."
Look southeast on Saturday (June 18) around 1 a.m. local time and you may be treated to a view of the waning gibbous moon joining Saturn as our satellite begins its monthly trip past the morning planets.
"It will be shining a generous palm's width to the lower right of the yellowish dot of Saturn," writes geophysicist Chris Vaughan, an amateur astronomer with SkySafari Software who oversees Space.com's Night Sky calendar.
Tom Marshburn may not be the real-life Buzz Lightyear, but the space ranger - at least as he appears in the new movie "Lightyear" - would not be the same without the NASA astronaut.
