Space

Amazon Has Enough Satellites to Launch Its Starlink Competitor Featured image: Artist’s concept of Amazon Kuiper satellites in low Earth orbit; credit: Amazon Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite broadband constellation has crossed a critical threshold. With 396 satellites now in orbit following a ULA Atlas V launch on July 1-2 carrying 29 spacecraft, the company announced […]

NASA’s TESS Mission Finds a Planetary System in a New Way Featured image: Artist’s concept of a super-Jupiter orbiting an orange dwarf star; credit: NASA NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has discovered its first exoplanet using gravitational microlensing, a technique the mission was never designed to perform. The planet, designated Gaia23bra b, is a super-Jupiter […]

The Growing Number of Satellites in Orbit Could Soon Make Telescopes Obsolete Featured image: Satellite streaks crossing a deep-field astronomical image; credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA The number of satellites in Earth orbit could soon reach a threshold where ground-based astronomy becomes impossible, according to a peer-reviewed study from the European Southern Observatory published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. […]

FCC to Vote on Satellite Licensing Overhaul July 22, Creating a ‘Licensing Assembly Line’ The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will vote on July 22 on the most significant reform of satellite and Earth station licensing in decades, replacing the decades-old Part 25 regulatory framework with a new Part 100 designed to handle the flood of […]

CoRoT-2 b Hotspot Anomaly Challenges Tidal Locking Assumptions Featured image: Artist’s impression of a hot Jupiter exoplanet with atmospheric glow; credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Hot Jupiters are some of the most extreme planets in the universe: gas giants that orbit so close to their stars that they complete a full lap in a matter of days. Astronomers […]

JWST Reveals Aerosols and Hydrocarbons in the Atmosphere of a Planet Orbiting a Dead Star Featured image: Artist’s impression of a Jupiter-sized planet transiting a white dwarf; credit: NASA/ESA/Joseph Olmsted (STScI) For the first time, astronomers have detected an atmosphere on a planet transiting a dead star. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, an international […]

NASA IG Audit Suggests Boeing’s Starliner Will Be a Decade Late for Certification Date: 2026-07-02 Featured image: Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner approaches the International Space Station during its Crew Flight Test; credit: NASA Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule may not achieve NASA human-rating certification until 2027, a full decade later than originally planned, according to a […]

Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins the Largest Cosmic Time-Lapse in History Featured image: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory at Cerro Pachon, Chile, under the Milky Way; credit: Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile has officially begun the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a 10-year project that will image the […]

ESA Outlines High-Tech Lander Instruments for Flagship 2050 Enceladus Mission Featured image: Artist’s concept of the Enceladus south pole with cryovolcanic plumes erupting from tiger stripe fractures; credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute The European Space Agency has detailed the tentative payload for a lander that would touch down on Saturn’s moon Enceladus in the early 2050s, […]

Russell Croman’s RC Astro has released standalone command-line versions of its most popular astrophotography tools, freeing BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, and StarXTerminator from their longtime dependency on PixInsight and Photoshop. The new RC-Astro CLI, announced June 24 and currently in beta, lets users run all three machine-learning-powered tools from a terminal or integrate them directly into other […]