Last January, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made its final flight with a landing that damaged at least one of its rotor blades and left it permanently grounded. But while it can no longer fly, it will continue to operate as a stationary Martian weather station. Ingenuity landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, under the belly of the … Read more
With the discovery of more than 5,600 planets orbiting other stars and images from robots we have sent to all the planets in our solar system, it is becoming abundantly clear that Earth is unique among worlds. Almost all of the exoplanets scientists have discovered since the 1990s fall into four main types: gas giants like Jupiter … Read more
Last November, the Voyager 1 spacecraft began sending gibberish radio signals back to Earth. Engineers have now identified the problem, but trying to repair a 46-year-old device on a craft 24 billion kilometres from Earth is not easy. Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 were both launched in 1977 on a reconnaissance mission to … Read more
Quirks and Quarks19:36Water, water, everywhere. But will we have enough to drink? After a winter that smashed heat records, researchers around the world are taking a close look at how human disturbances and the rapidly changing climate are affecting the world’s freshwater supply. “We’re reducing both water quantity and water quality,” says Katrina Moser, an associate professor … Read more
For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records — with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus. The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fuelled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren’t just the hottest for … Read more
A privately funded satellite is set to push methane tracking into a new era, once it launches into space on Monday. A collaborative mission between Environmental Defense Fund, Google, the Government of New Zealand and several other partners, MethaneSAT will track methane emissions around the globe in attempts to identify and quantify sources spewing the climate-heating greenhouse gas. For 20 … Read more
A private lander touched down on the moon Thursday but managed just a weak signal back, as flight controllers scrambled to gain better contact with the first U.S. spacecraft to reach the lunar surface in more than 50 years. Tension mounted in the company’s command centre in Houston, as controllers awaited a signal from the spacecraft … Read more
NASA’s newest climate satellite rocketed into orbit Thursday to survey the world’s oceans and atmosphere in never-before-seen detail. SpaceX launched the Pace satellite on its $948-million US mission before dawn from Cape Canaveral, Fla., with the Falcon rocket heading south over the Atlantic Ocean to achieve a rare polar orbit. The satellite will spend at … Read more
A volcano in southwestern Iceland erupted on Thursday for the third time since December, sending jets of lava into the sky and triggering the evacuation of the Blue Lagoon spa, one of the island country’s biggest tourist attractions. The eruption began at about 1 a.m. ET along a three-kilometre fissure northeast of Mount Sýlingarfell, the Icelandic Meteorological … Read more
Some residents of British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley were briefly enveloped in shades of pink and purple this morning. In Kelowna, a pink-hued fog appeared for several minutes shortly after 7:30 a.m. PT before returning to the more standard grey. “I thought, ‘OK, what’s going on out there?’” said Lise Guyot of her reaction when she saw the world turn pink … Read more
