Trump picks billionaire Jared Isaacman to lead NASA | Space Quiz! What's an unusual feature of "super puff" planets? | NASA to provide Artemis program update today: Watch live.
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A billionaire tech entrepreneur and private astronaut is Donald Trump's choice for the next NASA chief. The president-elect announced via social media today (Dec. 4) that he has picked Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of payment-processing company Shift4 Payments, for the job of NASA administrator. Isaacman has spaceflight experience: He has funded and commanded two groundbreaking private missions to Earth orbit, both of which flew with SpaceX hardware.
NASA is about to speak out about its plan to return astronauts to the moon. Top space agency officials will hold a press conference Thursday to give a public update on the state of NASA's Artemis program. The briefing will begin at 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) and stream live on the NASA+ streaming service and in the window above. The update comes at a time of transition for the U.S. government, as well as NASA, after President-elect Donald Trump announced yesterday his nomination of American billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman as his choice for NASA's next chief.
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Earth got a relatively close shave this morning (Dec. 4), as a sizable space rock zipped by just 1.4 million miles (2.2 million kilometers) away. The asteroid, called 2020 XR, made its closest approach today at approximately 12:26 a.m. EST (0526 GMT), passing just under six times the distance between Earth and the moon.
For the first time since the launch vehicle's catastrophic mission failure in 2022, Europe's Vega-C rocket is poised to return to flight Thursday (Dec. 5), after a delay. The European Space Agency (ESA) is scheduled to launch the Copernicus Sentinel-1C satellite today, lifting off from Kourou, French Guiana, during an instantaneous launch window on Dec. 5, at 4:20 p.m. EST (2120 GMT, 22:20 CET -- local time). The mission was supposed to fly on Wednesday (Dec. 4), but a mechanical issue with the launch gantry nixed that attempt.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a fourth world in a strange system of ultralight "super puff" planets. The new extrasolar planet or "exoplanet" was discovered around the sun-like star Kepler-51, located around 2,615 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan). Remarkably, the new world, designated Kepler-51e, isn't just the fourth exoplanet found orbiting this star; all these other worlds are cotton-candy-like planets. That means this could be a whole system of some of the lightest planets ever discovered.
Stay tuned, SiriusXM radio listeners, your program is about to get a signal boost. SpaceX is poised to launch the SXM-9 satellite Thursday morning (Dec. 5), for SiriusXM satellite radio. The payload is the tenth spacecraft launched for SiriusXM, and the third of the company's satellites to ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to orbit. A 90-minute launch window for the SXM-9 mission opens at 11:10 a.m. ET (1610 GMT), lifting off from Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in Florida.
Astronomer Teddy Kareta had spent countless nights over the years observing various objects across our solar system using Arizona's Lowell Discovery Telescope, or LDT. On Nov. 19, 2022, he set his alarm to ring shortly before midnight, in preparation for what he presumed would be a quiet observing night - and woke up to missed calls and messages from his boss. Those pings, he recalled, "more or less could be summarized as, 'Dude, you gotta get on the telescope right now! What are you doing? Pick up!'"
Originating from the pages of "Star Trek Explorer" magazine, a premium publication that sadly delivers its final issue in December after a three-decade run, comes a brand new hardback collection of imaginative "Star Trek" fiction written by an eclectic crew of all-star science fiction authors paired with acclaimed illustrators. "A Year To The Day I Saw Myself Die and Other Stories" beams into the holiday gift-giving season on Dec. 10 from London-based Titan Books as a 96-page edition containing 14 fully illustrated "Star Trek"-themed short stories collected for the first time and we've got an exclusive excerpt to share with fans.
