Hot on the heels of the successful crewed launch of Boeing’s new CST-100 Starliner on Wednesday, we have another rocket launch: This time it’s SpaceX’s massive Starship. This is the fourth test flight of the rocket — which will be uncrewed — that SpaceX founder Elon Musk hopes will one day take astronauts to Mars. The 120-minute … Read more
WASHINGTON: The first crewed launch of Boeing‘s Starliner spaceship to the International Space Station has been postponed again due to a technical snafu, the company said Tuesday.The next attempt will be May 21 at the earliest.The high-stakes mission was already called off last week, with two astronauts strapped in and ready to fly.That was because … Read more
Scientists have taken a clue from a carnival stunt known as the Wall of Death to help future astronauts on the moon stay healthy. But instead of riding motorcycles, moon colonists will simply run around the walls. For decades, carnival goers have been thrilled at the spectacle of stunt drivers taking motorcycles and even cars up … Read more
China on Friday launched a lunar probe to land on the far side of the moon and return with samples that could provide insights into differences between the less-explored region and the better-known near side. It is the latest advance in China’s increasingly sophisticated space exploration program, which is now competing with the U.S., still … Read more
NEW DELHI: After five months of silence, Nasa‘s Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in touch with Earth, having overcome a perplexing communication glitch through an innovative fix. The probe, which is currently 15 billion miles away from Earth, experienced issues with its flight data system’s telemetry modulation unit in November 2023, resulting in indecipherable data … Read more
WASHINGTON: Nasa’s Voyager 1 probe — the most distant man-made object in the universe — is returning usable information to ground control following months of spouting gibberish, the US space agency announced Monday.The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could tell it was still receiving their … 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
NASA’s plan to bring samples from Mars back to Earth is on hold until there’s a faster, cheaper way, space agency officials said Monday. Retrieving Mars soil and rocks has been on NASA’s to-do list for decades, but the date kept moving forward, as costs ballooned. A recent independent review put the total cost at … 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
NEW DELHI: Lab experiments have shown for the first time that spacecraft traversing through ice plumes in space might aid in identifying extraterrestrial life. This detection is possible even from minute portions of a cell contained within ice grains. If extraterrestrial life exists on moons such as Saturn’s Enceladus or Jupiter’s Europa, the massive geysers … Read more
