Voyager 1 Fired Up its Thrusters for the first Time in 37 Years

On Tuesday, November 28, 2017, a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up for the first time since November 1980, after 37 years without use. Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. Having operated for more than 40 years as of December 4, 2017, the …

What is a Supermoon and when is the next one?

The Moon follows an elliptic orbit around Earth. Naturally, sometimes it gets closer to the Earth than the other times. When it’s also full moon at its closest point to the Earth, it’s called Supermoon. As a result, the moon appears larger and brighter than usual in the sky. The counterpart of a supermoon is …

How to tell if a planet harbors life?

Are we alone in the universe? Or are there any other “living planets” other than Earth? How to tell if a planet harbors life? Until 1992, we even don’t know if there are any other planets around the other stars or not. In 1992, two Swiss astrophysicists, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz the first “exoplanet” …

Living on Mars is a terrible idea [we should colonize Titan, instead, scientist says]

In September 2017, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX has revealed a new plan to colonize Moon and Mars with giant reusable spaceships. They are ambitiously planning to send the first humans to Mars as early as 2024 to build the foundations for the first Martian city. But is Mars really the best …

10 Most Iconic Photos of Earth from Space

Earth is actually a fragile and isolated rock, a “blue marble” in a vast, cold and hostile space. But only after seeing our planet from space, we did really understand that. Seeing the Earth first time from a distance was a powerful experience that has changed the way we see our planet. Here are the …

Making Life Multiplanetary [Musk reveals a new plan to colonize Mars]

The billionaire founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk has revealed a new plan to colonize Moon and Mars with giant reusable spaceships. He provided an update on their Mars colonization plan at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC, see notes 1) in Adelaide, Australia this week. Musk plans to send 1 million people to Mars using BFR (see …

20 Best Photos of Cassini’s voyage around Saturn

Launched on October 15, 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft (see notes 1) went into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. Since then, it has taken thousands of photos of Saturn, the second-largest planet in the Solar System, its prominent rings, and moons. And on September 15, 2017, Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere and disintegrated. Here are …

When stars will be passing close to the Sun? Now we know

Sometimes, a wondering star comes and passes so close to our Sun. Now, thanks to data provided by the Gaia spacecraft, we can know the occurrence of these close passing-bys in advance. This potentially dangerous event last happened about 70,000 years ago, a wandering binary stellar system passed through the Solar System‘s Oort cloud (see …

Total Solar Eclipse 2017 Images From Space [plus videos]

On Monday, August 21, an estimated 2 million to 7.4 million Americans traveled to see the first total solar eclipse in 99 years to go coast to coast in the United States, which went from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina. But, some of them were unlucky, as the weather was overcast in some places. But, …

Huge Asteroid “3122 Florence” flyby video

On September 1, 2017, a potentially hazardous asteroid named 3122 Florence skimmed past Earth from a mere 4.4 million miles (7 million km) distance. The huge asteroid, which is around 2.7 mile (4.4 km) wide, was the “biggest object passed this close to Earth since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began”, …