As our view of Earth began to fade, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman went for his phone as if it were second nature. Just hours previously, the Artemis II crew had taken four of them on a daring ride around the moon in the dependable Orion spacecraft. The commander, Wiseman, found a chance to film the entire scene through a narrow glass in the docking hatch. He took out his beloved iPhone 17 Pro Max, pressed the record button, and let it roll for a while.
Joe Barnard is the man behind several rockets that do far more than just launch and crash. What set him apart is his ability to take ideas typically designated for full-fledged space initiatives and scale them back down to considerably smaller sizes. His most recent creation is a little camera pod that pops out of the rocket’s side at its highest altitude and records the entire scene.
Way down in the belly of the Orion spacecraft is a large cylindrical module built in Europe that provides almost everything the crew requires to safely return to Earth after a voyage to the Moon. The European Service Module houses all of the propulsion systems that maintain the crew safe and comfortable until splashdown, including power, water, air, and temperature control for all four astronauts. It was manufactured by Airbus for the European Space Agency, weighs a whopping thirteen tons and measures roughly four meters across and tall.
Photo credit: NASA
On April 6, four Artemis II astronauts in the Orion spacecraft sailed past the moon, and the photographs they brought back home revealed how familiar and yet completely unfamiliar the moon can appear. The closest they got to the surface was roughly 4,000 miles, but that doesn’t include the hours later when the crew sailed out to a record-breaking 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing Apollo 13’s mark from back in the day.
Artemis Watch 2.0 is CircuitMess’s latest wearable, released just days after NASA’s Artemis II crewed mission entered orbit around the moon, that provides space aficionados with a new way to stay up to date on lunar activity. This smartwatch enables users to customize its behavior from the start and can be effortlessly integrated into your daily routine.
Photo credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
Astronomers have just released a new set of images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope that show two young stars surrounded by all of the raw material that is used to form planets. On the left is the disk around the star Tau 042021, which is 450 light years away in the direction of Taurus. In the center, a dark band stretches out where the disk blocks the star’s light. Above and below you can see these massive, bright material cones. Then there’s this small jet shooting straight up and down, and it’s all made up of different sizes of dust particles, as well as fragments of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and other chemicals recognized in the infrared.
Back in the late 1980s, a group of engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) grabbed a camera and decided to document their workspace before the computing landscape changed around them. The resulting footage is a remarkable walk through Building 230, the room responsible for keeping Voyager, Galileo, and Ulysses on course through the solar system, guided by a staff member who clearly knows every piece of equipment by heart.
NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines a $180.4 million contract to deliver seven science payloads to a carefully chosen site near the lunar south pole. The Houston based company will use one of its larger lander configurations for the mission, designated IM-5, with a target landing date of around 2030 at Mons Malapert. The location was selected for good reason. The ridge maintains fairly consistent line of sight with Earth, receives relatively steady sunlight, and sits close to permanently shadowed regions that may hold water ice, a resource that could prove critical to sustaining long term human operations on the Moon.
