For a long time, the Moon was considered bone dry. And that’s not a surprise since our satellite has no atmosphere that could prevent liquid water from immediately evaporating into space. But what remained hidden from even the eyes of the Moon travelers, discovered by the probes, orbiters, and observers: there are enormous amounts of …
Category Archives: Astronomy
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Collects a Significant Amount of Material from Asteroid Bennu
NASA’s OSIRIS REx spacecraft was supposed to grab a sample of the asteroid Bennu so that it could be returned to Earth for analysis. The spacecraft grabbed the sample on Tuesday, October 20, 2020, but, it’s taken a few days to actually get photos of the tool. Now the mission scientists at NASA realized that …
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Successfully Touches Asteroid Bennu
Exciting news: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first United States spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid has successfully touched down the Asteroid Bennu. The touchdown and sample collection occurred on October 20, 2020, at about 22:12 UTC.
Oceans of the Solar System
Created by the Universidad de Puerto Rico en Arecibo (the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo) scientists, this amazing infographic shows the volumes of the oceans of the Solar System. The unit used is the volume of the liquid water on Earth, so the ocean volumes of the other planetary objects are given by the …
NASA’s Planet Patrol Project lets the volunteers help to find exoplanets
NASA announced a new citizen science project called “Planet Patrol” which lets the volunteers help to find exoplanets using TESS Space Telescope (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data. It is similar to another NASA citizen science project, “Backyard Worlds”, where volunteers or the “citizen scientists” are checking telescope images the same way the American astronomer Clyde …
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Moon passing in front of Mars in this spectacular video
On September 6, 2020, French astrophotographer Thierry Legault (@ThierryLegault) went to the South of Lisbon to capture the event of the Moon passing in front of Mars. The result is this spectacular video, titled “Occultation of Mars by the Moon” by Legault himself.
Life on Venus? Astronomers detected phosphine which is a strong signature of life
Life on Venus? Astronomers have detected the first sign of life in the deadly clouds of Venus. They found phosphine which displays a strong signature of life. If we can detect life itself soon, this might be the most exciting news in history.
Backyard Worlds: NASA is asking for volunteers to help find the hypothetical Planet 9
Some astronomers think in our outer solar system there’s a giant, undiscovered world hiding and they call it (for obvious reasons) Planet Nine. Whether it exists, it could be 5-10 times the size of the Earth and orbit Sun hundreds of times farther away than Earth orbiting Sun. Now, a NASA citizen science project called …
Ancient Mars: how Mars looked like when there was liquid water on its surface
The Planetary Society published an amazing animation showing the ancient Mars – how the red planet looked like when there was liquid water on its surface.
Saturn and its rings: Hubble’s spectacular new photo (July 4, 2020)
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took this spectacular photo of Saturn and its rings on July 4, 2020, when the ringed gas giant was 839 million miles (1,35 billion kilometers) from Earth.
