NASA recently conducted an important vacuum gun test at their Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory within the White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico for space rock collision research. The data gathered will be used to design shields that will eventually protect future spacecraft as well as astronauts from micrometeorites and space debris.
Even though you can’t visit this cosmic fingerprint captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope like Fingerprint Island in Croatia, it’s definitely a sight to be hold. What you’re actually looking at are 17 concentric dust rings emanating from a pair of stars, collectively known as Wolf-Rayet 140, located just over 5,000 light-years from Earth.
NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope observed an event, GW170817, that involved a collision between two neutron stars, which are the cores of massive supergiant stars. The energy released was so massive that it would match that of a supernova explosion, resulting in a jet propelled through space at nearly the speed of light.
The NASA Europa Clipper spacecraft will explore Jupiter’s moon Europa, as there is strong evidence that under a thick crust of ice, the moon hides a global ocean that could potentially be habitable. NASA’s Galileo orbiter had scientists believing they salty liquid reservoirs may aksi reside inside the moon’s icy shell, some of them beneath shallow lakes in its icy surface.
The JPL Venus Aerial Robotic Balloon prototype recently completed a series of test flights over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to a region of Earth’s atmosphere that mimics the temperature and density it would experience approximately 180,000 feet above Venus. These tests proved the concept’s suitability for accessing a region of Venus’ atmosphere too low for orbiters to reach, but where a balloon mission could function for a length of time.
SpinLaunch released a video of the tenth Suborbital Accelerator flight test from Spaceport America, New Mexico. This demonstrated to SpinLaunch partners’ that standard satellite components are inherently compatible with the company’s launch environment, while providing critical flight data, as all payloads were flown and recovered successfully.
There’s the Godzilla-like nebula, and then the Cat’s Eye Nebula in which the star ejected its mass in a series of pulses at 1,500-year intervals. Researchers have created the first computer-generated 3D model of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, revealing never before seen details, such as a pair of symmetric rings encircling its outer shell.
We found out that lunar caves could be used as shelter for future astronauts, but how did Earth’s Moon actually form? A supercomputer simulation predicted that an object approximately the size of Mars, called Theia, collided with Earth and that is how the Moon formed. It didn’t take months or even days, just a matter of hours, when material was launched directly into orbit after the impact.
NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured a Van Gogh-like scene on Jupiter, and now, it provides the highest-resolution image of its moon Europa as of yet. What we see is an area that spans 93 miles (150 kilometers) by 125 miles (200 kilometers) of Europa’s surface, uncovering a region crisscrossed with a network of fine grooves and double ridges.
Astronomers combined James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope data to trace light that was emitted by the large white elliptical galaxy on the left through the spiral galaxy on the right. The overlapping galaxy pair VV 191 includes near-infrared light from Webb as well as ultraviolet and visible light from Hubble.