It's alive! JAXA SLIM moon lander sends home new photos | SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts eager for launch to ISS March 1 | ISS astronauts witness 'spectacular' auroras from space
Created for znamenski.spacecom@blogger.com | Web Version
Japan's SLIM lander is alive after a long sleep on the moon. SLIM, short for "Smart Lander for Investigating Moon," responded to a command from Earth after hibernating for nearly a month. Part of that downtime fell during the cold of the moon's two-week night, mission officials announced
A new set of astronauts are ready for an International Space Station launch. SpaceX is set to launch four new astronauts on the Crew Dragon spacecraft for Crew-8, the eighth operational commercial crew mission for NASA, to the International Space Station no earlier than Mar. 1.
Earlier this month, International Space Station astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli captured absolutely stunning pictures of a flag-like green aurora stretching from the southern regions of the Earth far up into space. "The auroras from up here are spectacular," NASA's Moghbeli told Space.com. Of the green auroras Moghbeli saw on Feb. 15, she said it was one of her space mission highlights witnessing "some green, some red that just swept across the surface of the Earth."
NASA sees an even brighter future for its human moon-landing program after a private robotic mission safely touched down last week. Astronaut Tracy C. Dyson says NASA's Artemis program, which aims to put boots on the moon as soon as 2026, is getting "momentum" from the private Intuitive Machines landing. That mission, known as IM-1, made the first soft U.S. lunar touchdown in 52 years this past Thursday (Feb. 22).
In the Milky Way, not far from our sun, lies a colossal chain of gas clouds. It's called the Radcliffe Wave. Some 800 million stars live within the Radcliffe Wave, and the wave's star-forming gas is even now seeding hundreds of millions more. As you may imagine, the astronomers who discovered the Wave named it as such because it looked like a "wave" to them - and in a new paper, some of the same astronomers now present evidence that it is also a literal wave. It oscillates over time, they realized, its stars rising through the Milky Way's disk before falling back again.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has closed the investigation into the second flight of SpaceX's huge Starship vehicle, the agency announced this afternoon (Feb. 26). SpaceX has been prepping for Starship flight number 3, in keeping with the company's fast-paced "build, fly and iterate" philosophy. But today's news does not constitute clearance to launch, the FAA stressed.
Since last December, the NASA space probe had gone on a two-month hiatus as it glided 25 million miles (40.2 million kilometers) closer to the sun than it was designed to operate on its way to encounter a space rock named Apophis. The OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft inched the closest to the sun on Jan. 2, the first of seven such approaches (or "perihelions") on its calendar before it can reach its target asteroid in 2029. For the past two months, the spacecraft had tucked in one of its two solar panels to protect its most sensitive instruments, an endeavor that limited its power and ability to communicate back home. But NASA has now received enough information from the probe to determine it seems to be performing well.
Late last year, astronomers discovered a fascinating star system only 100 light-years away from us. Its six sub-Neptune planets circle very close to their host star in mathematically perfect orbits, piquing the interest of scientists searching for alien technology, or technosignatures, which they argue would offer compelling evidence of advanced life beyond Earth. To be clear, no such evidence was found in the system, dubbed HD 110067. However, the researchers say they're not done looking yet. HD 11067 remains an interesting target for similar observations in the future.
