Early Saturday morning, another company entered the exclusive club of successful orbital launchers, Firefly Aerospace, when their second attempt to reach orbit, named To The Black, lifted off on October 1. Plus, a crater in Spain, a new DART image, Juno flies by Europa, and an interview with Jochen Grandell regarding the Meteosat program.
The quest to understand the formation mechanisms of globular clusters was limited by the Hubble Space Telescope’s ability to peer back in time. Now, JWST’s larger mirror has allowed astronomers to find gravitationally lensed galaxies that have globular clusters almost nine billion years old. Plus, two new super-mercury exoplanets, This Week in Space History, and an interview with Eric Palmer about the DART mission.
Using a machine learning algorithm, scientists have confirmed 68 out of 77 potential gravitational lens candidates from a subset of over 5,000 possibilities. Plus, generation one stars, astronauts coming home, dating craters on Earth, lunar glass, and an interview with Amanda Sickafoose regarding the DART mission.
In advance of the next scheduled launch attempt, NASA conducted another test to fill the fuel tanks onboard the Space Launch System rocket. The results were mixed, but the launch is still on schedule. Plus, a crewed launch, beautiful images, and an interview with Mike Simmons from Astronomy for Equity about sending telescopes to underprivileged students.
Due to the gravitational pull of Jupiter on the fragments and dust of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, Earth’s orbit may be moving through a dense portion of the comet’s trail on May 31. This alignment could result in an unusually spectacular meteor outburst, and we’ll interview astronomer Pierre Martin about this possible event. Plus, a SpaceX launch that wasn’t Starlink, a new solar sail, and JWST.
A team of scientists combined stellar locations from the Gaia mission with dust and cloud maps from the WISE and 2MASS catalogs to create amazing three-dimensional images of the California Cloud and Orion A Cloud. Plus, rocket launches, the origin of carbon, and an interview with Dani DellaGiustina, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-APEX mission.
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