Space fans, get ready to start your moon engines.
NASA’s Artemis 1 uncrewed moon mission lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Nov. 16, 2022. One year later, the next moon rocket ride for astronauts is in testing for a new mission that could launch in late 2024.
One year ago today, NASA’s Artemis I mission with its Orion spacecraft lifted off into the heavens and towards the Moon on its maiden flight aboard the mighty Space Launch System (SLS) at 1:47 am EST from historic Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The goal of the uncrewed mission was to conduct a shakedown of all systems and subsystems prior to crewed missions to the Moon and kicked off a new era in human spaceflight as no humans have ventured beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Image of NASA’s Artemis I aboard the Space Launch System lifting off from historic Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on November 16, 2023 at 1:47 a.m. EST. (Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Traveling a total of 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) during its achieved mission time of 25 days, 10 hours, and 53 minutes, Orion conducted two flybys of our nearest celestial neighbor, with its closest approach to the lunar surface occurring on December 5 at 79.5 miles (128 kilometers). Additionally, Orion broke the record for the farthest distance from Earth by an Earth-returning human-rated spacecraft by traveling almost 270,000 miles (435,000 kilometers), which surpassed the previous record of 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) conducted by Apollo 13 in 1970.
While more than 5k exoplanets were identified, the count of planets within the diameter varies between 1.5 to two times the size of Earth, which is lower than anticipated.
Scientists have noticed a ‘size gap’ among exoplanets, specifically between 1.5 to two times the size of Earth. Fascinated, scientists are striving to learn the cause of this phenomenon.
A significant milestone has been reached in the field of quantum chemistry.
The Cold Atom Lab facility equipped on the International Space Station (ISS) has successfully generated a quantum gas composed of two distinct types of atoms for the first time in space.
You’re familiar with the states of matter we encounter daily – such as solid, liquid, and gas – but in more exotic and extreme conditions, new states can appear, and scientists from the US and China found one earlier this year.
They’re calling it the chiral bose-liquid state, and as with every new arrangement of particles we discover, it can tell us more about the fabric and the mechanisms of the Universe around us – and in particular, at the super-small quantum scale.
States of matter describe how particles can interact with one another, giving rise to structures and various ways of behaving. Lock atoms in place, and you have a solid. Allow them to flow, you have a liquid or gas. Force charged partnerships apart, you have a plasma.
NASA has temporarily stopped sending commands to its Mars-exploring robots, but there’s nothing to worry about.
We’re currently experiencing a “Mars solar conjunction,” a two-week stretch in which Earth and the Red Planet are situated on opposite sides of the sun. Mars mission teams halt commands during such alignments, which occur roughly every two years, for safety reasons.
Using ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, scientists have observed nightglow in Mars’ atmosphere, a phenomenon where the night sky glows green, almost like an aurora.
An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a large-scale structure that consists of at least 20 massive galaxies. The structure, dubbed “Cosmic Vine,” has a size of about 13 million physical light years. The finding was detailed in a paper published Nov. 8 on the pre-print server arXiv.
Massive and dense structures of galaxies are perceived as progenitors of galaxy clusters—the most massive gravitationally-bound systems in the universe. Therefore, detecting new structures of this type and investigating them in detail is fundamental for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.
Now, a group of astronomers led by Shuowen Jin of the Technical University of Denmark, has detected a new object of this type—a large vine-like structure, hence its name Cosmic Vine. The structure was revealed at a redshift of 3.44, in the Extended Groth Strip (EGS) field observed with JWST. The observations were complemented by data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
