Object that slammed into Florida home was indeed space junk from ISS, NASA confirms
Boeing Starliner spacecraft rolls out to Atlas V rocket | Space Quiz! How much of the universe do scientists think could be dark matter? | Object slammed into Florida home was space junk from ISS
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Starliner rolled out on a trailer towards its United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket around 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT) in preparation for its International Space Station (ISS) mission no earlier than May 6. Onboard the mission, known as Crew Flight Test (CFT), will be two veteran NASA astronauts and former Navy test pilots: commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams.
The mysterious object that crashed through the roof of a Florida home last month did indeed come from the International Space Station (ISS), NASA has confirmed. That home, in the seaside city of Naples, belongs to Alejandro Otero. Shortly after the March 8 incident, Otero said he thought the offending object was part of a cargo pallet packed with 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of aging batteries jettisoned from the ISS in March 2021. And he was right, according to a new NASA analysis of the object, which was performed at Florida's Kennedy Space Center.
Among the crowd, Vicki Stirm watched the sky through a palm-sized, iridescent black rectangle cut from the glass of a welding helmet, a tool that tinted the sun green as Earth's star mimicked a waning moon. It had belonged to her father, with whom she'd chased eclipses throughout her life, and who passed away in 2007. His name was Richard Ebert. "I just started crying," she said after totality was complete. "It was so beautiful. I was thinking of my dad, and when I was young."
Swiss Federal Councillor Guy Parmelin joined NASA administrator Bill Nelson Monday (April 15), at the space agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., to become the latest country to sign on to the agency's Artemis Accords for moon exploration.
(P. van Dokkum et al., Nature Astronomy accepted, 2023)
A fresh analysis of a remarkably massive yet compact galaxy from the early universe suggests that dark matter interacts with itself. The galaxy, JWST-ER1, which formed just 3.4 billion years after the Big Bang, was first spotted last October in images snapped by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). At over 17 billion light-years from Earth, JWST-ER1g is the farthest-ever example of a perfect "Einstein ring" - an unbroken circle of light around the galaxy, a result of light rays from a distant, unseen galaxy being bent due to the space-warping mass of JWST-ER1. The cosmic mirage is not just a pretty sight from a lucky alignment of galaxies; it also offers physicists a valuable probe for model-independent measurements of the mass enclosed within the ring's radius.
The Starlink launches just keep on coming. A Falcon 9 rocket topped with 23 of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites is scheduled to lift off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida today (April 17) during a four-hour window that opens at 5:26 p.m. EDT (2126 GMT). You can watch it live via SpaceX's account on X. Coverage will begin about five minutes before the window opens.
If all the reports of mysterious objects buzzing our skies are taken as true encounters, the Earth appears to be under assault. But spoiler alert: For the chief leader of the SETI Institute, established to search for and understand life beyond Earth, there's a need to step back and cuddle up to a cup of cosmic reality.
Thing are definitely heating up in the "Star Trek" universe this month. The fifth and final season of Paramount+'s "Star Trek: Discovery" rolled out on April 4, and "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is fast approaching the completion of principal filming for its upcoming third season in Toronto. And sprinting onto home video to join the spring festivities is "Star Trek: Lower Decks" Season 4, whose Blu-ray and DVD versions were released today (April 16). The show stars the crazy crew of the U.S.S. Cerritos and their often-chaotic adventures in the final frontier.
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