This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilize.

spacex fire

NASA's Juno spacecraft successfully completed its kickoff Jovian orbit and its outset and closest flyby to the tops of the gas behemothic's cloud banks this week. During its 36 planned orbits, Juno will gather data to help usa find out precisely what the core of Jupiter is fabricated of and why it makes the magnetosphere acquit similar it does. Every bit function of NASA'southward big public outreach projection, Juno'south visible-spectrum JunoCam will also send united states back some glamor portraits of Jupiter and its moons, peculiarly Europa and Io, while it keeps its principal research equipment trained on Jupiter'due south poles.

Their Dawn orbiter also made a burn into a higher orbit around Ceres, in gild to go a little easier on the satellite'due south dwindling reserves of hydrazine. It'due south withal sending us photos from Ceres, well after its planned EOL, and NASA intends to wring out equally of scientific discipline it can.

Post-obit up on an ascertainment of a galaxy cluster about 300 million light years away, a team of scientists from the Keck Observatory discovered that they'd stumbled on a cosmic oddity: a "failed Milky Way" milky way they think is made of 99% dark matter. It's called Dragonfly 44. The few stars visible in the galaxy aren't large enough to go along each other close with mutual gravity, but notwithstanding they stay together. We have no trouble seeing through the cluster to what'south behind it, only when we wait in that management, there'due south gravitational lensing going on, more than can be explained past the loose, "fluffy" distribution of stars in Dragonfly 44. The conclusion they've come up to is that at that place could be a quantity of dark matter dragging the stars in toward the center of the galaxy, and they promise to follow upwards their observations with other, more conclusive measurements that tin can assist to show usa the shape of the hole in our agreement about whatever information technology is we're calling dark matter.

Speaking of common cold, night things that are unhelpfully far away and hard to discover, scientists presented evidence for another planet in our solar organisation, dubbed Planet nine (from outer space!). Finding out whether it'southward actually there volition require that we zero in further on its present location. This currently involves working backwards from other objects that appear to accept been perturbed by Planet 9's gravitational sway, and then doing the calculations to notice its path through fourth dimension.

Recently scientists located a possibly habitable exoplanet orbiting in the Goldilocks zone around Proxima Centauri, our adjacent-door stellar neighbor. It'south still too far away to directly observe whether or non information technology has an atmosphere, permit alone actually visit to drib a probe on the surface. Just information technology'due south right there. Planets are just popping up everywhere these days.

The image from the Pioneer 10 plaque, designed by Carl and Linda Sagan and Frank Drake. Image: NASA

The image from the Pioneer 10 plaque, designed by Carl and Linda Sagan and Frank Drake. Image: NASA

Sadly, the possible extraterrestrial point SETI was investigating turned out to be a dud. Our first clue was that it didn't repeat. Likewise, it was in a weird part of the EM band. Once nosotros really started digging into the indicate, the team plant that it was the content equivalent of someone's washer plugged into a poorly grounded outlet. But we keep sending unsolicited nudes into space and trying to find out where the aliens alive, and then it actually shouldn't be a surprise if they just coast correct on past Globe with the headlights off.

As well, from the section of distinctly unwanted news, SpaceX had an world-shattering kaboom at Cape Canaveral early on Thursday forenoon. During a static test, there was an explosion that appeared to originate from the upper stage of the oxygen tank, co-ordinate to Elon Musk. The vehicle and payload were both lost. The AMOS-6 satellite that would accept enabled Facebook's internet.org venture was on the vehicle when it exploded, but nobody cares about what makes Zuckerberg cry, and their walled-garden Facebook-branded internet is a terrible idea anyhow.

Among SpaceX'south other customers are EchoStar, Iridium and the CRS missions to resupply the International Space Station. EchoStar satellites supply Dish Network and also HughesNet satellite cyberspace customers, while the Iridium constellation is responsible for GPS. Since SpaceX is supposed to be carrying the new Iridium and EchoStar constellations into orbit over the next couple of years, we really, actually need them to not have ships blowing up.