Polaris Dawn: Meet the crew of 1st commercial spacewalk | Jupiter's JUICE probe slingshots by Earth on way to Venus | Astrophotographer captures Saturn behind the moon
Created for znamenski.spacecom@blogger.com | Web Version
Strapped into the same Crew Dragon that launched Inspiration4, Jared Isaacman, the mission's commander, will ride a Falcon 9 rocket to orbit alongside fellow Polaris Dawn crewmember Scott "Kidd" Poteet, a retired United States Air Force (USAF) Lieutenant Colonel serving as mission pilot, with Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both Lead Space Operations Engineers at SpaceX - and the first employees to launch to space on one of the company's rockets - serving as mission specialists.
The European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft - which stands for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer - has completed a historic, first-of-its-kind flyby of Earth and the moon. The craft, which launched on April 14, 2023, is now heading toward a flyby of Venus, the second planet from the sun, which will ping it back to Earth for more gravity assists in 2026 and 2029. After those flybys, JUICE will be on to Jupiter and its moons, set to reach its ultimate target in July 2031.
Photographer Josh Dury was up bright and early to capture the event from his location in Somerset, U.K. "I have waited years to see a lunar occultation of Saturn. What can be more majestic than one of the most famous planets of the solar system being obscured by the moon?" Dury told Space.com in an email.
"If successful, this mission will be the first private mission to land on another body outside of our Earth-moon system and will move us closer to realizing our mission of making off-world resources accessible to all humankind," AstroForge wrote in an update.
Thankfully, actual black holes and stars can't be smashed together in the lab! However, scientists can use advanced supercomputer modeling to simulate a black hole ripping apart and devouring a star in a so-called "tidal disruption event" or "TDE." Doing just that, a team of researchers led by Danel Price from Monash University has discovered that the answer to our opening question is "things get messy."
These two Dragons are getting ready to spread their wings. SpaceX just gave us a look at the Crew Dragon capsules that will fly on the Polaris Dawn and Crew-9 astronaut missions, which are set to launch on Aug. 27 and Sept. 24, respectively.
Imagine trying to land an SUV-sized rover on another world. That's definitely enough of a challenge on its own, but picture doing so while the rover hangs perilously beneath a hovering sky crane, connected by just a handful of clothesline-like nylon cables.
The universe should either be crowded with life or harbor hardly any life at all, according to a new study that revamps the Drake equation using probabilistic logic.
