Topic: Pamela Gay
Closer Look: Commercial Lunar Payload Services

Closer Look: Commercial Lunar Payload Services

The shadow of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander on the Moon. Space exploration is at a weird point in its development. Some tasks, like launching small and medium-sized satellites to low earth orbit are now as routine as overnight shipping. At the same time, landing things on the Moon somehow seems to be harder than it was in the 1960s, as mission after mission doesn’t quite nail their landing. In this kind of a moment in time, you might expect lanches to be just another contracted activity, while significant research and development money is invested into the innovations necessary to...

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500,000 Stars, with More Born Regularly

500,000 Stars, with More Born Regularly

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia) Our Solar System lives in a nice suburb of the Milky Way. Sitting about 25,000 light years from the galactic center, we’re in a good place to view what’s happening in the core district, but far...

More Theory-Changing Old Galaxies

More Theory-Changing Old Galaxies

Credit: Cluster image: NASA, UNCOVER (Bezanson et al., DIO: 10.48550/arXiv.2212.04026). Insets: Nasa, UNCOVER (Wang et al., 2023); Composition: Dani Zemba/Penn State Ok, I have to admit, the JWST is finding objects so exceedingly weird that my first reaction is to...

Lucy Sends Science Home

Lucy Sends Science Home

Credit: NASA Back in October 2021, a mission called Lucy lifted off on a multi-year journey to visit Jupiter’s two collections of Trojan Asteroids. Today, it is making its way through the asteroid belt before circling back to use the Earth to get a gravitational...

Closer Look: Satellites versus Science

Closer Look: Satellites versus Science

Bluewalker 3 over Kitt Peak In this week’s closer look, we go where I haven’t really wanted to go before: we are going to look at the impacts of the growing number of satellites, like star links, on our ability to safely live and do astronomy. This closer look is...