March 16, 2022, was a huge milestone for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): the alignment process of the telescope’s mirrors has finally been completed successfully and it produced the first unified, aligned, and bright image of a single star. NASA announces JWST’s optics are working as expected. The space telescope was reported to be “fully focused”.
On March 13, 1986, European Space Agency‘s (ESA) Giotto spacecraft made the closest approach to Halley’s Comet at a distance of 596 kilometers (370 miles).
Today’s (March 13) story of what happened this day in Science, Technology, Astronomy, and Space Exploration history.
Discovered on January 6, 2015, Kepler-442b is a near-Earth-sized exoplanet. Most probably it is a rocky planet and it orbits its star, Kepler-442, within the habitable zone. According to some sources, including Wikipedia, it is an even more habitable planet than Earth. But, that’s not the case, and this claim is just an inaccurate interpretation of a 2015 study. Here’s why.
This stunning video by “Epic Spaceman” shows how big the Orion Nebula is compared to our Sun. According to the creator, it took 6 months to prepare this video.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) took its first photo today (February 11, 2022). Despite we see multiple stars on the photo, the image is actually a mosaic of 18 images of the same star, HD 84406, which will now be used to align the 18 segments of the primary mirror to ultimately produce a single image of that star. The new space telescope also took its own selfie!
Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy published on his Twitter account an amazing video of the International Space Station (ISS) transiting the Moon, over the landing site of Apollo 11, the first moon landing mission. Such an incredible amount of human achievement is represented in just one short video!
Here is the full-HD video of the James Webb Space Telescope launch (JWST). An Ariane 5 launch vehicle (see notes 1)(Ariane Flight VA256) launched the James Webb Space Telescope from Ariane Launch Complex No. 3 (ELA 3) at Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, on December 25, 2021, at 12:20 UTC (09:20 local time, 07:20 EST, 13:20 CET).
Today I learned that there’s a solar eclipse calculator on the NASA website. Its official name is JavaScript Solar Eclipse Explorer (JSEX). Using this solar eclipse calculator, you can compute the local circumstances for every solar eclipse visible from a city for any century from -1499 to 3000 (1500 BCE to 3000 CE).