State-run media says landing ‘spectacularly conquered’ a new milestone; it joins US Perseverance rover which landed in February
An unmanned Chinese spacecraft has successfully landed on the surface of Mars, Chinese state news agency Xinhua has reported, making China the second space-faring nation after the US to land on the red planet.
The official Xinhua news agency said the lander had touched down on Saturday, citing the China National Space Administration.
Continue reading...Osiris-Rex has been flying around the ancient asteroid since 2018 and collected nearly a pound of rubble last fall
With rubble from an asteroid tucked inside, a Nasa spacecraft fired its engines and began the long journey back to Earth on Monday, leaving the ancient space rock in its rearview mirror.
The trip home for the robotic prospector, Osiris-Rex, will take two years.
Continue reading...The remnants of China’s largest rocket plummeted back to Earth, plunging into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, according to Chinese state media and people in Oman and Jordan who captured footage of its light in the sky.
Most of the rocket debris burned up in the atmosphere, according to the China Manned Space Engineering Office
Continue reading...US agency accuses Beijing of failing to meet expected standards regarding its space debris
Remnants of China’s biggest rocket have landed in the Indian Ocean, ending days of speculation over where the debris would hit and drawing US criticism over a lack of transparency.
The coordinates given by Chinese state media, citing the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO), put the point of impact west of the Maldives archipelago.
Continue reading...Defense secretary is hopeful the rocket will land in the ocean; Aerospace Corp said it expects the debris to hit the Pacific near the equator
The US military has no plan to shoot down the remnants of a large Chinese rocket expected to plunge back through the atmosphere this weekend, the defense secretary said on Thursday.
Speaking with reporters, Lloyd Austin said the hope was the rocket would land in the ocean and that the latest estimate was that it would come down between Saturday and Sunday.
Continue reading...Communist party newspaper claims Long March 5B should easily burn up in atmosphere but expert warns pieces will reach Earth
The White House has called for “responsible space behaviours” as a Chinese rocket, thought to be out of control, looks set to crash back to Earth on Saturday, US time.
The US Space Command is tracking debris from the Long March 5B, which last week launched the main module of China’s first permanent space station into orbit. The roughly 30-metre (100ft) long stage would be among the biggest space debris to fall to Earth.
Continue reading...Capsule parachutes into Gulf of Mexico at 3am, the first night-time US crew splashdown since 1968
SpaceX safely returned four astronauts from the International Space Station on Sunday, making the first US crew splashdown in darkness since the Apollo 8 moonshot.
The Dragon capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida, just before 3am, ending the second astronaut flight for Elon Musk’s company. It was an express trip home, lasting just six and a half hours.
Continue reading...China has sent into space the core module of its space station at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in the southern province of Hainan, kicking off a series of key launch missions with one of the goals to create a national space laboratory.
This will enable scientists from around the world to conduct multi-domain space science and technical experiments. The space station should be completed by the end of next year
Continue reading...Astronaut and pilot of the command module Columbia during 1969’s Apollo 11 mission
On 20 July 1969, Michael Collins, who has died aged 90, became the most solitary human in the universe – even if he derided that categorisation as “phony philosophy”. He orbited the moon alone, inside Apollo 11’s command module Columbia, and out of touch with ground control for 48 minutes on each orbit. Meanwhile, and more famously, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were becoming the first men to set foot on that rock, some 240,000 miles away from Earth.
As the command module pilot, on $17,000 a year, Collins was, he later wrote half-jokingly, “the navigator, the guidance and control expert, the base-camp operator, the owner of the leaky plumbing – all the things I was least interested in doing”. He was also, thought Aldrin, probably Nasa’s best-trained command module pilot.
Continue reading...China has successfully launched the first module of its new space station, part of an ambitious plan for Beijing to have a permanent human presence in space. The Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, unmanned core module, launched from Wenchang in China’s Hainan province, is expected to become fully operational in 2022, with about 10 more missions required to launch and assemble parts
Continue reading...The space station is expected to become fully operational in 2022 after about 10 missions to bring up more parts and assemble them in orbit
China has launched the first module of its new space station, a milestone in Beijing’s ambitious plan to place a permanent human presence in space.
The Tianhe or “Heavenly Harmony” unmanned core module, containing living quarters for three crew, was launched from Wenchang in China’s Hainan province on a Long-March 5B rocket on Thursday.
Continue reading...Flight path of Kalahari’s six-tonne asteroid is first tracing of meteorite shedding rock to solar system origin
Astronomers have reconstructed the 22m-year-long voyage of an asteroid that hurtled through the solar system and exploded over Botswana, showering meteorites across the Kalahari desert.
It is the first time scientists have traced showering space rock to its source – in this case Vesta, one of largest bodies in the asteroid belt that circles the sun between Jupiter and Mars.
Continue reading...Ingenuity successfully takes flight, hovering at height of about 3 metres before touching back down
Nasa’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has completed the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, the space agency has announced.
The small helicopter successfully took flight on the red planet on Monday morning, hovering in the air at an altitude of about 3 metres (10 feet), before descending and touching back down on the Martian surface.
Continue reading...Alison McAlpine’s documentary draws out tales from locals and astronomers to evoke the magic and mystery of Chile’s stargazing hotspot
Cielo means “sky” in Spanish, and “heaven”, too. And it’s with a sense of humbled wonder at the immense mystery of it all that the Canadian film-maker Alison McAlpine casts her camera upwards in this beautiful documentary about the night sky. It’s filmed at the stargazing hotspot of Chile’s Atacama desert, where there is virtually no light pollution; the heavens appear to be within touching distance – as if a seam in the sky has been unpicked and the stars tumble out like diamonds.
For those of us who live in urban areas, we look up from noisy streets and bright city lights to the vast emptiness of the sky. In Atacama, it’s the reverse; the sky seems more alive than the earth – a bare, Martian landscape of rock and sand. With her cinematographer, Benjamín Echazarreta, McAlpine shoots some astonishing time-lapse photography, which features alongside interviews with astronomers at the European observatories in the desert and locals who eke out a living somehow. One man is a UFO photographer; he thinks that humans are more evil than the aliens and, knowing this, the aliens don’t bother to land.
Continue reading...New Netflix drama Stowaway is the latest in a crop of movies that suggests space travel is more random death and boredom than warp speed nine
Anybody who fancies watching a new science fiction film this month can count their lucky stars. A Netflix drama, Stowaway, features Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette and Daniel Dae Kim as a trio of astronauts who are on their way to Mars when they discover that an unfortunate launch-plan engineer, Shamier Anderson, is still onboard. The trouble is, there is only enough oxygen for three of them. American viewers can also see Voyagers (due for release in Britain in July), in which 30 hormonal starship passengers are preparing to colonise another world. The trouble is, something goes wrong on their mission, too, and the trip turns into an interplanetary Lord of the Flies. The moral of both stories is that you should probably push “astronaut” a few slots down your list of dream jobs. But if you’ve caught any other science fiction films recently, it’s bound to be quite far down the list, anyway.
Again and again over the past decade, cinema has warned us that venturing beyond the Earth’s atmosphere is uncomfortable, dangerous, exhaustingly difficult, frequently tedious, and almost certain to involve interplanetary angst and asphyxiation. George Clooney’s morose The Midnight Sky rounded off 2020 with a fatal spacewalk. Aniara and Passengers posited that existence on a colony ship was a lot grimmer than Wall-E had led us to believe. The “sad dads in space” sub-genre coalesced with Brad Pitt’s Freudian moping in Ad Astra, and Robert Pattinson’s in High Life. No wonder today’s youngsters would rather be YouTubers or influencers than astronauts. The overriding thesis of current science fiction films is this: space travel is rubbish.
Continue reading...The Ingenuity helicopter, which arrived on the red planet in February, is expected to take to the skies on Wednesday
Nasa is gearing up to attempt the first controlled flight on another planet next week, with the tiny Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.
The helicopter is expected to take to the skies next week, with Wednesday being the earliest time scheduled.
Continue reading...The physicist on Newton finding inspiration amid the great plague, how the multiverse can unite religions, and why a ‘theory of everything’ is within our grasp
Michio Kaku is a professor of theoretical physics at City College, New York, a proponent of string theory but also a well-known populariser of science, with multiple TV appearances and several bestselling books behind him. His latest book, The God Equation, is a clear and accessible examination of the quest to combine Einstein’s general relativity with quantum theory to create an all-encompassing “theory of everything” about the nature of the universe.
How close do you believe science is to accomplishing a theory of everything?
Well, I think we actually have the theory but not in its final form. It hasn’t been tested yet and Nobel prize winners have taken opposite points of view concerning something called string theory. I’m the co-founder of string field theory, which is one of the main branches of string theory, so I have some “skin in the game”. I try to be fair and balanced. I think we’re on the verge of a new era. New experiments are being done to detect deviations from the Standard Model. Plus, we have the mystery of dark matter. Any of these unexplored areas could give a clue as to the theory of everything.
Chunk of space rock was once the ‘poster child for hazardous asteroids’ but it will be a while before humans need to worry about it again
Nasa has given Earth the all clear on the chances of an asteroid called Apophis hitting our planet any time in the next century, having worried space scientists for over 15 years.
The 340-metre (1,100ft) chunk of space rock hit the headlines in 2004 after its discovery led to some worrying forecasts about its orbit. It became a “poster child for hazardous asteroids”, according to one Nasa expert.
Continue reading...The microscopic animals can withstand extreme conditions that would kill humans, and may one day help in the development of Covid vaccines. How do they do it?
On 11 April 2019, a spacecraft crashed on to the Moon. The Israeli Beresheet probe was supposed to land gently in the Mare Serenitatis, a huge plain of basalt rock formed in a volcanic eruption billions of years ago. It would have been the first privately funded mission to land on the Moon. But owing to a last-minute instrument failure Beresheet did not slow down enough and slammed into the surface at 500 kilometres per hour.
From the Moon’s point of view, this was a failed alien invasion. Beresheet was carrying animals called tardigrades, which look like stunted, microscopic caterpillars. They may not seem like an obvious candidate for interplanetary travel, but tardigrades are famed among biologists for their ability to survive conditions that would kill almost any other animal. It is possible that some of them survived the crash.
Continue reading...Nasa’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, has sent back the sounds of its six metal wheels driving across the planet’s surface. The recording was captured by one of its two onboard microphones, with Nasa releasing 16 minutes’ worth. Engineers are investigating whether a high-pitched scratching noise is caused by electromagnetic interference or the rover’s movement. Perseverance will continue to look for somewhere to launch the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, a drone that it is carrying
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