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WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Jamming and astrophysics go hand-in-hand for Queen lead guitarist Brian May, who announced Wednesday he is releasing a musical tribute to a far-flung NASA spacecraft that is about to make history. The US space agency’s New Horizon’s spacecraft will soon make the most distant flyby of a cosmic object ever, zipping by an object called Ultima Thule — a billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, on January 1. A […]
by Gene Blevins Agence France Presse MOJAVE, United States (AFP) — Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, flew higher than it ever has before on Thursday, surpassing what the US Air Force considers the boundary of space, and marking the first manned flight to space from US soil since 2011. The brief, suborbital flight — with two pilots on board — was a key milestone for the company headed by British tycoon Richard Branson, who is […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has left the protective bubble around the Sun and is flying through interstellar space, becoming the second human-made object to travel so far, the US space agency said Monday. The announcement came six years after its twin spacecraft, Voyager 1, broke the outer boundary of the heliopause, where the hot solar wind meets the cold, dense space between stars, known as the interstellar medium. Voyager 2 […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — SpaceX on Wednesday blasted off its unmanned Dragon cargo ship, loaded with supplies, science experiments and food for the astronauts living at the International Space Station but failed to successfully land its booster afterwards. “We have had a great liftoff,” said SpaceX commentator John Insprucker, as the Falcon 9 rocket soared into the sunny, blue sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida at 1:16 pm (1816 […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — NASA’s first-ever mission designed to visit an asteroid and return a sample of its dust back to Earth arrived Monday at its destination, Bennu, two years after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The $800 million unmanned mission, known as OSIRIS-REx, made a rendez-vous with the asteroid at around 12:10 pm (1710 GMT), firing its engines a final time. “We have arrived,” said Javier Cerna, […]
by Laurent Banguet / with Kerry SHERIDAN in Tampa Agence France Presse PASADENA, United States (AFP) — Cheers and applause erupted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday as a $993 million unmanned lander, called InSight, touched down on the Red Planet and managed to send back its first picture. The high-drama landing of the waist-high spacecraft capped a nearly seven year journey, from spacecraft design, to launch to eventual touchdown, marking the eighth successful […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — A spacecraft that cost nearly a billion dollars is on course to make a perilous landing Monday on Mars, if it can survive a high-speed approach and the scorching heat of entering the Red Planet’s atmosphere, a process NASA has nicknamed “six and a half minutes of terror.” “There is very little room for things to go wrong,” said Rob Grover, head of […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — NASA is counting down to a nail-biting touchdown Monday of the $993 million Mars InSight, the first spacecraft to listen for quakes and study the inner workings of another rocky planet. No one is on board the spacecraft, which launched nearly seven months ago and has traveled some 300 million miles (482 million kilometers). But part of its mission is to inform efforts to […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — NASA has picked an ancient river delta as the landing site for its uncrewed Mars 2020 rover, to hunt for evidence of past life on Earth’s neighboring planet, officials said Monday. Even though the Red Planet is now cold and dry, the landing site, Jezero Crater, was filled with a 1,600-foot (500-meter) deep lake that opened to a network of rivers some 3.5 to […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Dawn, a NASA spacecraft that launched 11 years ago and studied two of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, has ended its mission after running out of fuel, officials said Thursday. Scientists have known for about a month that Dawn was essentially out of hydrazine, the fuel that kept the spacecraft’s antennae oriented toward Earth and helped turn its solar panels to the Sun to recharge. When the spacecraft […]
by Kerry SHERIDAN Agence France Presse TAMPA, United States (AFP) — The US space agency’s Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and is being retired after nine and a half years, having helped discover more than 2,600 planets, some of which may hold life, officials said Tuesday. The unmanned space telescope, which launched in 2009, revealed that billions of hidden planets are in space and revolutionized humanity’s understanding of the universe, experts said. […]
TAMPA, United States (AFP) — NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which launched earlier this year, has set a new record for becoming the closest human-made object to the Sun, the US space agency announced Monday. “The spacecraft passed the current record of 26.55 million miles (42.73 million kilometers) from the Sun’s surface on Oct. 29, 2018, at about 1:04 pm EDT (1704 GMT),” said a NASA statement. “The previous record for closest solar approach was set […]
