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NASA Space Telescopes
NASA's newest space telescope rocketed toward orbit Tuesday to map the entire sky like never before a sweeping look at hundreds of millions of galaxies and their shared cosmic glow since the beginning of time. SpaceX launched the Spherex observatory from California, putting it on course to fly over Earth's poles. Tagging along were four suitcase-size satellites to study the sun. The USD 488 million Spherex mission aims to explain how galaxies formed and evolved over billions of years, and how the universe expanded so fast in its first moments. Closer to home in our own Milky Way galaxy, Spherex will hunt for water and other ingredients of life in the icy clouds between stars where new solar systems emerge. The cone-shaped Spherex at 1,110 pounds (500 kilograms) or the heft of a grand piano will take six months to map the entire sky with its infrared eyes and wide field of view. Four full-sky surveys are planned over two years, as the telescope circles the globe from pole to pole
Boeing called off its first astronaut launch because of a valve problem on the rocket Monday night. The two NASA test pilots had just strapped into Boeing's Starliner capsule when the countdown was halted, just two hours before the planned liftoff. A United Launch Alliance engineer, Dillon Rice, said the issue involved an oxygen relief valve on the upper stage of the company's Atlas rocket. There was no immediate word on when the team would try again to launch the test pilots to the International Space Station for a week-long stay. It was the latest delay for Boeing's first crew flight, on hold for years because of capsule trouble. In a situation like this, if we see any data signature is not something that we have seen before, then we are just simply not willing to take any chances with what is our most precious payload, Rice said. Starliner's first test flight without a crew in 2019 failed to reach the space station and Boeing had to repeat the flight. Then the company encountere
NASA's newest climate satellite rocketed into orbit Thursday to survey the world's oceans and atmosphere in never-before-seen detail. SpaceX launched the Pace satellite on its USD 948 million mission before dawn, with the Falcon rocket heading south over the Atlantic to achieve a rare polar orbit. The satellite will spend at least three years studying the oceans from 420 miles (676 kilometres) up, as well as the atmosphere. It will scan the globe daily with two of the three science instruments. A third instrument will take monthly measurements. It's going to be an unprecedented view of our home planet," said project scientist Jeremy Werdell. The observations will help scientists improve hurricane and other severe weather forecasts, detail Earth's changes as temperatures rise and better predict when harmful algae blooms will happen. NASA already has more than two dozen Earth-observing satellites and instruments in orbit. But Pace should give better insights into how atmospheric ...
New observations of WASP-39 b reveal a never-before-seen molecule in the atmosphere of a planet sulfur dioxide among other details.The telescope's array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a "hot Saturn" -- a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a star some 700 light-years away -- known as WASP-39 b. While JWST and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, previously have revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet's atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds."The clarity of the signals from a number of different molecules in the data is remarkable," says Mercedes Lopez-Morales, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and one of the scientists who contributed to the new results."We had predicted that we were going to see many of those signals, but still, when I first saw the data, I was in awe," Lopez-Morales adds.The ...