What time is SpaceX's private Polaris Dawn launch on Aug. 27? | How to watch SpaceX's Polaris Dawn launch on Aug. 27 | SpaceX Polaris Dawn: Live updates
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A SpaceX rocket will launch four people into space on the private Polaris Dawn mission this week and if you want to watch the liftoff live, you'll need to know when and where to watch. And in this case, it might help to be an early bird.
The first ever 3D radiation map of Jupiter and its moons has been created using low-light cameras aboard the Juno Spacecraft that have been tweaked to operate as radiation detectors. The map reveals how Jupiter's powerful magnetosphere influences the radiation environment around one of the gas giant's moons, Europa, which is crucial for understanding the moon's surface chemistry, potential habitability, and the challenges of future space missions to this icy world.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for the Polaris Dawn mission sports modifications for the first-ever private spacewalk, which will take place after the scheduled launch on Aug. 27. Polaris Dawn's Dragon will also soar higher than any crewed spacecraft since the Apollo missions, flying above Earth at an altitude of about 435 miles (700 kilometers). Here's all its new upgrades.
On Aug. 12, 2026, Europe will experience its first total solar eclipse in 27 years. This total solar eclipse will have a long and broad path, rising in remote Siberia and setting just east of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. But only a small portion of that path crosses land, with 15.2 million people — the vast majority in northern Spain — destined to witness totality that day.
The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than Aug. 27. It aims to perform the first-ever private spacewalk and to fly at a higher altitude above Earth than any crewed spacecraft since the Apollo era, at about 870 miles (1,400 kilometers). That means its two female astronauts, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, are about to set a new record for women astronauts.
The cluster is known as Barbá 2 and is found just 24,000 light-years or so away from Earth. An investigation using the star-surveying Gaia space telescope revealed that the Barbá 2 is packed with red supergiant stars, stars that can be hundreds of times wider than the sun and up to 1,000,000 times as luminous as the sun. "There are many open clusters in the galaxy. However, not all open clusters have the same level of interest to astronomers," Ignacio Negueruela, a researcher at the Universidad de Alicante who was part of the team behind the discovery of supergiants in Barbá 2, told Space.com. "Clusters rich in red supergiants are very rare and tend to be very far away, but they play a crucial role in understanding key aspects in the evolution of massive stars."
Polaris Dawn is poised to make history. The SpaceX mission, which is scheduled to launch early Tuesday morning (Aug. 27), will send four people to orbit for five days aboard a Crew Dragon capsule. That quartet will get farther from Earth than any human since the Apollo era — and two of them will perform the first spacewalk ever conducted by a private mission. Here's how the spacewalk will work.
Science fiction fans are more than familiar with the concept of a "warp drive," a device that allows spacecraft to travel at velocities faster than light, aka so-called "superluminal" speeds. These instruments are typically written as being able to manipulate the very fabric of space and time, or spacetime. Yet, even hard-core sci-fi aficionados may be surprised to learn there are a few theoretical musings about warp drives in true science as well and scientists are already wondering what happens when they fail.
