Special to CosmicTribune.com, June 9, 2022 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was struck by a larger than expected micrometeoroid in late May, slightly damaging one of the spacecraft’s 18 primary mirror segments. NASA said that the telescope is “still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements.” The telescope cost NASA nearly $10 billion […]
May 21, 2017 Utah amateur Patrick Wiggins discovered a possible bright supernova in the spiral galaxy NGC 6946 in Cygnus on May 13. If confirmed, 2017 eaw will become the 10th supernova found in this explosion-rich galaxy in the past century, reaffirming its reputation for fireworks of the grandest kind. It was Wiggins’s third supernova, […]
September 11, 2016 David Dickinson, Sky and Telescope The dusk skies lit up over Cape Canaveral on September 8th, as NASA’s ambitious Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security and Regolith Explorer (Osiris-REX) mission started its long round trip journey. Its mission: meet up and explore Earth-crossing Apollo asteroid 101955 Bennu and bring samples of it […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Ivo Scheggia] A few days ago, a bright fireball was photographed from the Alps mountain range in Switzerland as it blazed across the sky. The fireball, likely from the Taurids meteor shower, was notable not only for how bright it was, but for the rare orange light it created […]
With the “blood moon” or total lunar eclipse expected to occur on Sept 28, the debate if the apocalyptic predictions that it is the end of the world would happen is once more resurrected barely three years after the Mayan calendar did. On one hand, NASA had issued a statement that the blood moon would […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Jared Tennant Dusty debris from periodic Comet Swift-Tuttle was swept up by planet Earth this week. Vaporized by their passage through the dense atmosphere at 59 kilometers per second, the tiny grains produced a stream of Perseid meteors. A bright, colorful Perseid meteor flash was captured during this 20 […]
. . . The Daily Mail has checked it out and it’s nothing to worry about. The rumor did force NASA to respond with a non-denial denial. And a professor did say there’s a asteroid out there with our name on it. And a former astronaut did say we’ve just been lucky so far in […]
A cosmic mystery is uniting monks and scientists in Japan after a tree grown from a cherry stone that orbited the Earth for eight months bloomed years earlier than expected — and with very surprising flowers. The four-year-old sapling — grown from a cherry pit that spent time onboard the International Space Station (ISS) — […]
Spanish astronomers spotted a meteorite with a mass of about half a tonne crashing into the lunar surface last September. They say the collision would have generated a flash of light so bright that it would have been visible from Earth. … “This is the largest, brightest impact we have ever observed on the Moon,” […]
How would you change the course of an Earth-threatening asteroid? One possibility – a massive spacecraft that uses gravity as a towline – is illustrated in this artist’s vision (Dan Durda (FIAAA, B612 Foundation)) of a gravitational tractor in action. In the hypothetical scenario worked out in 2005 by Edward Lu and Stanley Love at […]
