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We have a little bit of everything. Hear the voices of the astronomy community on the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast, or catch up on the news with our Daily Space episodes. Also catch launches, landings, and other special events as they happen with us on Twitch.
Upcoming Daily Space Guests
- Thursday, May 14: Catherine Johnson
“Mars Magnetic Field” - Tuesday, May 19: Jian-Yang Li
“Comet 2I/Borisov”
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Citizen Science
CosmoQuest invites you to help NASA scientists make maps of scientifically interesting features in our Solar System. You can map craters on the Moon, and trace the splatter of asteroid impacts on Vesta. All these worlds are yours to explore!
Currently we’re rebuilding all our citizen science projects with a new interface. We’ll get you sciencing again as soon as we can.
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Blog
Virgin Orbit set to launch cubesat into orbit
Today, Virgin Orbit is going to attempt to launch a cubesat on its LauncherOne rocket from the belly of a modified 747. This Richard Branson-owned company is a sister to Virgin Galactic, and like its sibling, this company looks to avoid the hold-ups in access to space that can happen at spaceports like Kennedy.
Cosmic ring of fire discovered
Today, we have just one science story, and it has one terribly large hole poked through the center of it; a literal hole scientists are having fun explaining. This artist’s rendition shows you what appears to be a messy ring of star formation with nothing in the center.
Bennu is about to be sampled
We are super pleased to share that the OSIRIS-REx mission is now scheduled to collect materials from the surface of the asteroid Bennu on October 20, and the material will be collected from the Nightingale site.
New type of asteroid discovered
Found out near Jupiter last June and classified as a Trojan asteroid, 2019 LD2 grew itself a tiny tail as volatile materials got heated by the sun and pushed away by the solar wind. This tail was confirmed last July, and its development was followed until geometry took this active asteroid out of our view and hid it behind the Sun.
Twinkling heart of the Milky Way spotted
In 2017, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) stared toward our system’s heart of darkness, Sag A*, a 4 million solar mass black hole. There they found a flicker of light, hanging on, in a mind-breaking orbit.
Planet birth in AB Aurigae
Today, we have news from the Very Large Telescope about AB Aurigae, a young variable star 520 light-years away. When observed in the infrared, a spiral in the disk of gas and dust in this system indicates the presence of a forming planet at a Neptune-like distance from the star.
Massive galaxy found in early universe
A week after talking about a survey of galaxies formed in the early universe that rotates, we are getting a new press release announcing that the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array has discovered a particularly massive galaxy in the early universe.
Galaxy mergers trigger black hole growth
Last summer, undergraduate Rebecca Minsley traveled to the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Institute for Astrophysics to take part in a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program. Commonly just called an REU, these internships are a right of passage for the majority of future researchers.
China’s new generation of crewed spaceship test ship successfully returned
The first test of the Chinese next-generation crewed spacecraft returned to Earth and finished its mission on May 8th, after spending two days and nineteen hours in orbit.