Space News and Discussions

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[firestar464]

who cares about this glazing event

[weatheriscool]

who cares about this glazing event

This is literally the only way humans are going to mars or outwards in the next 25 years if china doesn't get its shit together. That is why it matters.

If musk can get away from Trump and refocus back on space then maybe shit can happen.

[firestar464]

Human presence on Mars is far from essential. Probes are doing the job just fine. In any case, this is hardly a sufficient reason for glazing.

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[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Rocket Lab Successfully Launches Electron Rocket With Busy Year Ahead
This marks the 65th launch of the Electron design, with only four failures in the rocket's history.
By Jon Martindale June 3, 2025
https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/r ... year-ahead

Rocket Lab's Electron rocket continued its successful launch history this week by inserting the BlackSky Gen-3 satellite into a low-Earth-orbit target, 292 miles above the Earth. This is the seventh successful launch Electron has made this year, but the schedule is only going to accelerate from here. There are already a further 14 launches planned for the rest of 2025, with two more slated for 2026, and a further 10 within a 2025-2027 launch window.

Rocket Lab has been developing its Electron rocket design for over a decade and has been successfully launching payloads for customers since the end of 2018. Although the industry has been dominated by larger rocket developers, like SpaceX, Rocket Lab has continually championed the smaller rocket industry. In April, it argued that there was a value in being able to control the orbital insertion angle, instead of just ride-sharing on someone else's payload in a larger rocket design, like a Falcon 9, or future Starship.

[wjfox]

‘Crazy idea’ about cooling effects of Pluto’s haze confirmed by new James Webb Telescope data

New study in Nature Astronomy affirms hypothesis made by UC Santa Cruz’s Xi Zhang in 2017

June 2, 2025
By Mike Peña

The first observations of Pluto by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal dramatic phenomena on its surface, like seasonal cycles of volatile ice redistribution across its surface, and material being pulled from its very atmosphere onto its main satellite, Charon—an eerie interaction that happens no where else in our solar system.

These exotic conditions are detailed in a series of studies published this spring by an international team of researchers. But while the image of molecules from one globe’s atmosphere drifting through space and settling on its celestial sidekick’s north and south poles seems strange, one UC Santa Cruz researcher on the team is smiling.

The most recently published paper, appearing in Nature Astronomy on June 2, confirms hypotheses first made by UC Santa Cruz’s Xi Zhang about Pluto’s atmosphere based on the historic flyby of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015 that gave researchers the closest look yet at the curious orb at the edge of the solar system.

https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/06/pluto-cooling-haze/



NASA's New Horizons spacecraft captured this image of Pluto's surface shrouded in atmospheric haze. (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

[caltrek]

New Study Casts Doubt on the Likelihood of a Milky Way – Andromeda Collision
June 2, 2025

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) Scientists from Helsinki, Durham and Toulouse universities used data from NASA’s Hubble and the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescopes to simulate how the Milky Way and Andromeda will evolve over the next 10 billion years.

The two galaxies are currently heading towards each other at a speed of about 100 kilometres per second.

A collision would be devastating for both galaxies which would be destroyed, leaving behind a spheroidal pile of stars known as an elliptical galaxy.
The team ran 100,000 simulations of both galaxies based on the latest observational data.
….
They found only a 2% probability that the galaxies will collide in the next five billion years, contrary to the previous belief that a collision – and the demise of the Milky Way - was a certainty within that timeframe.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1085453

For a technical presentation of study results as published in Nature Astronomy: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-025-02563-1

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[wjfox]

[wjfox]

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[weatheriscool]

Honda Now Makes VTOL Rockets and Early Tests Are Encouraging
This is the first successful test of a reusable first-stage rocket outside of the USA and China.

If we needed any further indication that the 21st-century space race is heating up, Japanese car maker Honda has thrown its hat in the ring with a successful test of a reusable first-stage rocket. Said to have been under development for at least six years, the rocket flew to a height of 900 feet before returning carefully and safely to the launch pad, completely intact.

Although the space shuttle pioneered the idea of reusable launch vehicles in the 1970s, it was only in the 2000s and 2010s that the idea really took off. The SpaceX Falcon 9 became the first commercial launch vehicle to nail the reusable first-stage concept, but others have followed in its wake, and many more are expected from US and Chinese aerospace firms in the 2020s. Honda just demonstrated the first potential Japanese launch vehicle that could do much the same.

In this test, Honda launched a small rocket, measuring just 21 feet tall and 2.8 feet in diameter, weighing just under 2,900 pounds when fully fuelled up. The rocket took off from its launch pedestal, retracting its landing legs in the process. It then flew carefully to its intended height of around 900 feet before extending fins similar to those of the Falcon 9 and performing a controlled descent. It touched back down within just a few inches of its intended target, according to Honda.

The flight lasted just under a minute.

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/h ... ncouraging

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[weatheriscool]

Groundbreaking Vera Rubin Observatory reveals first images

edited by Andrew Zinin
Editors' notes

The Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula -- stellar nurseries within our Milky Way -- are seen in unprecedented detail.

The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile published their first images on Monday, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies.

More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos.

One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula—both several thousand light-years from Earth—glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops.

The image reveals these stellar nurseries within our Milky Way in unprecedented detail, with previously faint or invisible features now clearly visible.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-groundbre ... veals.html

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Indian, Hungarian, Polish Astronauts Launch to Join The ISS for the First Time
The four-person crew launched from Kennedy Space Center above a SpaceX Dragon capsule strapped to a Falcon 9.
By Jon Martindale June 25, 2025

Houston-based Axiom Space has launched four astronauts to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. What makes this launch special is that its crew is made up of Hungarian, Polish, and Indian astronauts. This is the first time any of these countries have conducted a government-sponsored manned space mission in the past 40 years and the first time ever they've been sent to the International Space Station.

The launch faced several delays due to high altitude winds and a leaky module on the ISS, with its original June 11 pushed back two weeks to confirm everything was safe. Once all was well, though, the launch was approved, and at 3:21 a.m. ET, the Falcon 9 took off and ultimately deployed its human cargo into orbit a few minutes later.

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/i ... -the-first

[weatheriscool]

[firestar464]

New Scientist- Dead NASA satellite unexpectedly emits powerful radio pulse

https://archive.ph/AHw7O