A propellant leak will keep Astrobotic's Peregrine lander from touching down on the moon, but the mission team is working to extend the probe's life as long as possible. Here's the latest in this developing story.
Astrobotic's troubled Peregrine moon lander has snapped its first photo in the final frontier, and the image holds clues about what happened to the spacecraft. The company says the photo suggests a propulsion system issue, which is in line with a fuel leak detected on board.
Earth-observing satellites have helped detect previously unmapped global fishing vessels, revealing nearly 75% of the world's industrial activity at sea was "hidden" from public view. Using satellite imagery from 2017-2021, vessel GPS data and machine learning software, a team led by the Global Fishing Watch created the first world map of large vessel traffic and offshore infrastructure.
On Tuesday morning, the moon will meet up with three of our closest neighbors in the solar system. A very thin crescent moon, will appear low in the sky next to Mercury, Mars and Venus. Here's when and how to see them in the early Jan. 9 predawn sky.
Steve Fentress, recently retired director of the Strasenburgh Planetarium in New York, is our guide to the night sky this week. He'll enlighten us about the lore of the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, one of the more remarkable constellations in the sky, as well as a general tour of other notable constellations and their stories across the ages. And... he's even got a planetarium joke!
Astronomers continue to struggle in their hunt for dark matter, the elusive and mysterious form of matter that dominates the mass of the universe. But one astronomer proposes that, instead of building gigantic, expensive experiments on Earth, we should try another method of searching for dark matter: Looking to the stars.
NASA has awarded funding to 13 innovative space technology concepts that could shape future missions to Venus, Mars and worlds beyond our solar system. "The daring missions NASA undertakes for the benefit of humanity all begin as just an idea, and NIAC is responsible for inspiring many of those ideas," NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free said in the statement.
Venus is often called Earth's sister planet, but is it also a celestial companion of cozy microbes? A new study finds that amino acids remain stable in concentrated sulfuric acid, the stuff that Venus' clouds are made of. That's extremely interesting to astrobiologists, since amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which are essential for life as we know it.
