Category Archives: Space Exploration

New Horizons shows nearby stars from an unearthly perspective

NASA’s New Horizons space probe is currently the farthest human-made object that still able to take photographs. It was launched on January 19, 2006. As of June 14, 2020, it is about 6.973 billion kilometers (4.332 billion miles) away from Earth. This is about 46.61 AU, or Astronomical Unit, the distance between the Earth and […]

NASA’s Plan to Build a Base Camp on the Moon Sounds Like Sci-Fi, But It’s Real

If we’re ever going to make Elon Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars a reality, we first need to figure out an essential component of the plan: how to get there. After all, it’s somewhere between 34 and 140 million miles away from Earth. The moon is barely spitting distance closer, relatively speaking-but it’s a start. […]

Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space now the first woman to reach the deepest point of the ocean

Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space on October 11, 1984, now also becomes the first woman to reach the deepest point of the ocean, the Challenger Deep, at the southern end of the Mariana Trench. She also became only the eighth person ever to reach the Challenger Deep.

Human spaceflight is a risk worth taking, says ESA head

On 12 April, the International Day of Human Space Flight commemorates the first human – Yuri Gagarin – travelling to space in 1961, and the inaugural Space Shuttle mission on the same day in 1981. Since Gagarin, humans have flown to space hundreds of times, including six missions to the moon, and have maintained a […]

SpaceX Crew Dragon arrives at the ISS

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule arrives at the International Space Station (ISS) following up a historic liftoff with an equally smooth docking. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule (named Endeavour by the crew) docked automatically to the ISS, no assistance needed.

Please use crewed, not manned

The American science communicator Emily Calandrelli (also known as The Space Gal, @TheSpaceGal on Twitter) published a very funny video on her Twitter account, which can be titled as “please use crewed”. To explain her cause, Calandrelli used the popular “Joey, the famous ‘Friends’ character being taught French” meme, where Phoebe hopelessly tries to teach […]

We need faster spaceships. Nuclear-powered rockets may be the answer

This article is originally published on The Conversation with the title of “To safely explore the solar system and beyond, spaceships need to go faster – nuclear-powered rockets may be the answer”. Iain Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder With dreams of Mars on the minds of both NASA and Elon Musk, long-distance crewed missions through […]

Capturing a Satellite (November 1984)

An amazing image titled “Capturing a Satellite” by NASA: Astronaut Dale A. Gardner prepares to dock with the spinning WESTAR VI satellite during the STS-51A mission. He was wearing a getting his turn in the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU, see notes 1). Gardner used a large tool called the Apogee Kick Motor Capture Device to […]