'Our understanding of the universe may be incomplete' | NASA delays Artemis astronaut moon landing to 2027 | Space Quiz! How many astronauts will fly on Artemis 2?
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(NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Jose M. Diego (IFCA), Jordan C. J. D'Silva (UWA), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Jake Summers (ASU), Rogier Windhorst (ASU), Haojing Yan (University of Missouri))
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have corroborated data from its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, to determine something is missing from our recipe of the cosmos. "With two NASA flagship telescopes now confirming each other's findings, we must take this [Hubble tension] problem very seriously — it's a challenge but also an incredible opportunity to learn more about our universe," one scientist says.
We'll have to wait a bit longer to see the first crewed moon mission since the Apollo era lift off. NASA announced today (Dec. 5) that it's delaying the planned launch of Artemis 2, a flight that will send four people around the moon and back, from September 2025 to April 2026. And Artemis 3, a crewed moon landing that had been targeted for late 2026, is now scheduled for mid-2027. The extra time is needed primarily to finish prepping the Orion capsule for its first-ever crewed flights, according to NASA officials.
The sun appears to have woken from its slumber with an impulsive X-class solar flare, the most powerful class of solar flare. The dramatic eruption originated from sunspot region 3912, reaching its peak at 4:06 a.m. EST (0906 GMT) on Dec. 8, and was accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a large plume of magnetic field and plasma from the sun.
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The Geminid meteor shower is one of the most prolific annual meteor showers, impressing skywatchers year after year. It is possible to see up to 120 meteors per hour under dark conditions when the Geminids peak each year. Unfortunately for skywatchers this year, the almost full moon could interfere with shooting star-hunting efforts when the Geminid meteor shower peaks overnight on Dec.13 -14.
A brighter, more obvious crescent moon will tonight be positioned about halfway between Venus, to its lower right, and bright star Spica, to its upper left.
SpaceX launched another batch of its broadband satellites from Florida early Sunday morning (Dec. 8). A Falcon 9 rocket launched 23 Starlink spacecraft, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sunday at 12:12 a.m. EST (0512 GMT).
The chance of liquid oceans hiding beneath the surface of moons orbiting Uranus has enticed NASA to begin planning a new mission that will send a spacecraft to the ice giant. <br> "Discovering liquid water oceans inside the moons of Uranus would transform our thinking about the range of possibilities for where life could exist," Hemingway says.
The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — the world's largest visible- and infrared-light telescope — is currently under development on the Cerro Armazones mountain in Chile's Atacama Desert. The mighty telescope is expected to see its "first light" by 2028, with the goal of observing terrestrial exoplanets and their atmospheres, as well as measuring the expansion of the universe. New photos from the ESO reveal that progress has really been made with construction of the ELT, including its dome, central structure and base of the M1 mirror — one of five mirrors that will work together to observe the cosmos.
