The Indian embassy’s social media post celebrating the successful test flight of the indigenously developed Agni-5 ballistic missile has gone viral, accumulating more than 10,000 likes and 3,000 reposts. The post, shared on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter) by the Indian embassy in China, praised the achievement and shared Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s congratulatory message to the Defence Research & ...
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SpaceX Launches Double Satellite, Deploys 46 Satellites in Record Time; Crew to Return Tomorrow [Watch Live]
US private space agency SpaceX completed the flawless deployment of 46 Starlink internet satellites into low-Earth orbit within a span of just six hours on Monday, heralded as the Elon Musk-owned firm’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket embarked on its mission from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. SpaceX and NASA are targeting as ...
Read More »Who’s Rajeev Badyal? New Indian American chosen to serve in National Space Council
Indian-American Rajeev Badyal has been chosen to be one the 30 members selected by US Vice President Kamala Harris to serve on the National Space Council’s Users Advisory Group (UAG) to provide advice on space-related projects and issues. Rajeev Badyal presently leads Amazon’s Project Kuiper — an initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites to provide low-latency, ...
Read More »Watching water droplets merge on the International Space Station
Understanding how water droplets spread and coalesce is essential for scenarios in everyday life, such as raindrops falling off cars, planes, and roofs, and for applications in energy generation, aerospace engineering, and microscale cell adhesion. However, these phenomena are difficult to model and challenging to observe experimentally. In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Cornell University and Clemson University designed ...
Read More »Bengaluru to miss spectacular view of Geminid meteor shower tonight
Sky watchers can witness a meteor shower peaking between Tuesday night and well into the early hours of Wednesday, Dec 12-13 night as the Geminid meteor shower comes around this time of the year when several meteoroids, left behind by ‘rock comet’ 3200 Phaethon, enter the earth’s atmosphere. While Bengaluru-based Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium is organising an event to watch the ...
Read More »Edward Stone: 50 Years at NASA ends, but his brainchild Voyager’s Project goes on
Stone’s remarkable tenure on NASA’s longest-operating mission spans decades of historic discoveries and firsts. Edward Stone has retired as the project scientist for NASA’s Voyager mission a half-century after taking on the role. Stone accepted scientific leadership of the historic mission in 1972, five years before the launch of its two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Under his guidance, the Voyagers explored the four ...
Read More »NASA’s Swift, Fermi missions detect exceptional cosmic blast
Astronomers around the world are captivated by an unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation that swept over Earth Sunday, Oct. 9. The emission came from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the most powerful class of explosions in the universe – that ranks among the most luminous events known. On Sunday morning Eastern time, a wave of X-rays and ...
Read More »NASA: Are you in an area of Lucy then take a photograph, post it to social media
On Oct. 16, at 7:04 a.m. EDT, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, the first mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, will skim the Earth’s atmosphere, passing a mere 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the surface. By sling-shotting past Earth on the first anniversary of its launch, Lucy will gain some of the orbital energy it needs to travel to this never-before-visited population ...
Read More »Are we alone in the universe? JPL’s OWLS, other tools to help search for life in deep space
A team at the Lab has invented new technologies that could be used by future missions to analyze liquid samples from watery worlds and look for signs of alien life. Are we alone in the universe? An answer to that age-old question has seemed tantalizingly within reach since the discovery of ice-encrusted moons in our solar system with potentially habitable subsurface ...
Read More »No Picnic in the Clouds! It’s JPL aerobot
JPL’s Venus Aerial Robotic Balloon Prototype Aces Test Flights A scaled-down version of the aerobot that could one day take to the Venusian skies successfully completed two Nevada test flights, marking a milestone for the project. The intense pressure, heat, and corrosive gases of Venus’ surface are enough to disable even the most robust spacecraft in a matter of hours. ...
Read More »Webb Telescope, Hubble Telescope Capture Detailed images of DART Impact
Two of NASA’s Great Observatories, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, have captured views of a unique NASA experiment designed to intentionally smash a spacecraft into a small asteroid in the world’s first-ever in-space test for planetary defense. These observations of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact mark the first time that Webb and Hubble ...
Read More »Astronomers Detect Protective Shield Defending Pair of ‘Dwarf Galaxies’ with help of FUSE, Hubble
For billions of years, the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet – to the puzzlement of astronomers – these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star ...
Read More »NASA-Built ‘Weather Sensors’ Capture Vital Data on Hurricane Ian
A pair of microwave radiometers collected data on the storm as they passed over the Caribbean Sea aboard the International Space Station. Two recently launched instruments that were designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to provide forecasters data on weather over the open ocean captured images of Hurricane Ian on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022, as ...
Read More »Celebrate ‘International Observe the Moon Night’ with NASA [Details]
The public is invited to participate in NASA’s celebration of “International Observe the Moon Night” on Saturday, Oct. 1. This annual, worldwide public engagement event takes place when the Moon is close to first quarter – a great phase for evening observing. Last year about 500,000 people participated from 122 countries and all seven continents. This celebration provides opportunities to learn about ...
Read More »Space News: Planetary-scale ‘heat wave’ discovered in Jupiter’s atmosphere
An unexpected ‘heat wave’ of 700 degrees Celsius, extending 130,000 kilometres (10 Earth diameters) in Jupiter’s atmosphere, has been discovered. James O’Donoghue, of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), has presented the results this week at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 in Granada. Jupiter’s atmosphere, famous for its characteristic multicoloured vortices, is also unexpectedly hot: in fact, it is ...
Read More »Opportunity to Space enthusiasts: Join the exciting challenge to explore the Moon! [Details]
Lunar enthusiasts of all ages are challenged to help identify features on the Moon that might pose a hazard to rovers or astronauts exploring the surface. The 2022 EXPLORE Lunar Data Challenge is focused on the Archytas Dome region, close to the Apollo 17 landing site where the last humans set foot on the Moon 50 years ago this December. The Machine Learning ...
Read More »Astronomers detect hot gas bubble swirling around the Milky Way’s black hole
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have spotted signs of a ‘hot spot’ orbiting Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The finding helps us better understand the enigmatic and dynamic environment of our supermassive black hole. “We think we’re looking at a hot bubble of gas zipping around Sagittarius A* on an orbit ...
Read More »Webb space Telescope Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings, Unusual Moon ‘Triton’
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light. Most striking in Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the ...
Read More »On Track: Artemis I mission Cryogenic Demonstration Test Today at 4.45 Pm IST [Live schedule]
NASA Television will provide live coverage of the upcoming Artemis I cryogenic demonstration test on NASA TV beginning at 7:15 a.m. EDT or 4.30 pm IST on Wednesday, Sept. 21. The demonstration test will allow teams to confirm the repair to a hydrogen leak seen during an early September Artemis I launch attempt, evaluate updated propellant loading procedures, and conduct additional evaluations. The demonstration will ...
Read More »Mars lander InSight’s power diminishing fast, end of mission in sight?
InSight, which has hit headlines this week with the realtime recording of sound from the Mars when meteoroids struck Mars’ surface at four places since its landing on the Red Planet in November 2018, is nearing the end of its mission by mid-2023. The first NASA mission to explore Mars’ deep interior, InSight rover landed on Mars surface on Nov. ...
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