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Astronomers using ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) have examined a small group of five galaxies in the southern hemisphere. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. The NGC 5018 galaxy group lies in the constellation of Virgo, approximately 130 million *light-years from Earth.*[one light year, the distance light travels in a year, at its fixed speed of 186,000 miles per second, works out to about 5.9 trillion miles -etl] It consists of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 5018, the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 5022, the spiral galaxy MCG-03-34-013, and two face-on dwarf, gas-rich spirals.NGC 5018 (the milky-white galaxy...

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It's going to be a big night for space tourism. The private spaceflight company SpaceX will reveal its first passenger for a trip around the moon on the company's massive BFR rocket and you can watch it all live online. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has even dropped tantalizing previews of the BFR's new rocket design on Twitter. SpaceX will unveil its BFR rocket passenger (the name stands for Big Falcon Rocket) in a webcast tonight (Sept. 17) at its Hawthorne, California headquarters. You can watch it live here, courtesy of SpaceX, beginning at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 Sept. 18 GMT)....

"We're going to launch our own satellite — our own damn satellite to figure out where the pollution is and how we’re going to end it," Brown told the audience at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco..."In California, with science under attack, in fact we’re under attack by a lot of people, including Donald Trump, but the climate threat still keeps growing," Brown added. "So, we want to know, what the hell is going on all over the world, all the time?"..."If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite," Brown said back in...

A NASA satellite designed to precisely measure changes in Earth’s ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice and vegetation was launched into polar orbit from California early Saturday. A Delta 2 rocket carrying ICESat-2 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 6:02 a.m. and headed over the Pacific Ocean. NASA Earth Science Division director Michael Freilich says that the mission in particular will advance knowledge of how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute to sea level rise. The melt from those ice sheets alone has raised global sea level by more than 1 millimeter (0.04 inch) a year recently,...

California Gov. Jerry Brown said Friday that the state plans to launch its "own damn satellite" into orbit to battle climate change. The man the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko famously dubbed "Gov. Moonbeam" made the announcement at the conclusion of a two-day climate summit he organized in San Francisco. [Snip] Before Brown's announcement, two prominent Democrats and a Republican mayor criticized Trump for his decision to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate accord. "While Donald Trump may have pulled out of the climate agreement, the American people have not," former Secretary of State John Kerry said...

How Fast Is Earth Moving? As an Earthling, it's easy to believe that we're standing still. After all, we don't feel any movement in our surroundings. But when you look at the sky, you can see evidence that we are moving. Some of the earliest astronomers proposed that we live in a geocentric universe, which means that Earth is at the center of everything. They said the sun rotated around us, which caused sunrises and sunsets — same for the movements of the moon and the planets. But there were certain things that didn't work with this vision. Sometimes, a...

The push for a space elevator took a step forward this week when a team of researchers from Shizuoka University in Japan announced that they will launch an experiment to the International Space Station next week. In the experiment, which will be the first of its kind in space, two ultrasmall cubic satellites, or "cubesats," will be released into space from the station. They will be connected by a steel cable, where a small container — acting like an elevator car — will move along the cable using its own motor. A camera attached to the satellites will record the...

Starting? When did it stop? The real question is: who’s paying for it now? Space has just come to the forefront because we now recognize how critical Space has become to our life. Civil space technology is now WAY ahead of our military. Strangely this is more a race between US Venture Capitalists and the Russians, Chinese, North Korea and Iran. The military is along for the ride. The Space Race has become one where our commercial companies are now developing and providing capabilities at a price that our military can only dream of and foreign country militaries just read...

FULL TITLE: Now Elon Musk faces US Air Force investigation into his wild weed-smoking podcast because the drug-taking breaches SpaceX security clearance rules The US Air Force is looking into Elon Musk after he smoked marijuana during a wild, rambling two-and-a-half-hour podcast streamed live onto YouTube, it emerged on Friday. Marijuana use is prohibited for people with government security clearance, which Musk gained in 2015 when his company SpaceX started launching satellites for the Pentagon. The US Air Force told DailyMail.com a formal investigation is not underway at this time, but would not rule out that members of the department...

“If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred. A fully reusable vehicle has never been done before. That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.” --Elon Musk

Mars, NASA NASA Is Preparing A 17 Year Old Girl To Become The First Human On Mars Lauren WebberJuly 10, 2018, 10:15 amJuly 10, 2018 The 17-year-old is training to be on the first NASA trip to the red planet, where she’ll spend two to three years. (Photo: NASA Blueberry) Alyssa Carson fell in love with space when she was only 3 years old and now is making it her life’s work to be the first human to land on Mars.The 17-year-old is training to be on the first NASA trip to the Red Planet, where she says she’ll...

...just more of the same anti-American crap.... The late Neil Armstrong’s 1969 trip to the moon may have been “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” but it was also a massive achievement for the United States. One of Armstrong’s first orders of business was to proudly plant the American flag, after all. But Ryan Gosling, the Canadian actor who plays Armstrong in “First Man,” Hollywood’s rendition of the moon landing, told the Telegraph the magic moment was intentionally omitted from the big screen because Armstrong’s achievement “transcended countries and borders.” ...More at link:

Regulations currently keep such scenes in the realm of fantasy, but that could change soon. NASA is creating a new committee that will investigate expanding commercial activities and collaborations in low-Earth orbit and beyond, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Wednesday (Aug. 29). "We're talking about, potentially — Is it possible for NASA to offset some of its costs by selling the naming rights to its spacecraft, or the naming rights to its rockets?" Bridenstine said during a public meeting of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) at the agency's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. "I'll tell you, there is...

“We observed an extended area of infrared emissions around RX J0806.4-4123, the total size of which translates into about 200 AU (astronomical units [~92.5 million miles-etl]) at the assumed distance of the pulsar.” This is the first neutron star in which an extended emission has been seen only in the infrared.Dr. Posselt and colleagues suggest two possibilities that could explain this extended infrared emission.The first is that there is a disk of material (possibly mostly dust) surrounding RX J0806.4-4123. The second is a so-called ‘pulsar wind nebula.’ “One theory is that there could be what is known as a ‘fallback...

Establishing President Donald Trump's sought-after Space Force could cost $12.9 billion over its first five years, according to an Air Force document obtained by CNN. The Air Force estimates that the first year "additive costs" associated with establishing the new military branch in the 2020 fiscal year, including the creation of a headquarters, would amount to $3.32 billion. The document also estimates that the Space Force will oversee some 13,000 personnel when it is officially launched. In a memo accompanying the proposal, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson calls on Congress to authorize and fund the establishment of a Space Force...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a detailed image of a spectacular part of the Coma cluster, a structure of over a thousand galaxies bound together by gravity. The Coma Cluster, also known as Abell 1656, lies in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, about 300 million light-years away from Earth.Many of the galaxies in the cluster are ellipticals, as is NGC 4860, the brighter of the two galaxies dominating this Hubble image.However, the outskirts of the cluster also host younger spiral galaxies that proudly display their swirling arms.Again, this image shows a wonderful example of such a galaxy...

The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu — and they've even sent back some wild postcards from their new home. The tiny rovers are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission. Engineers with the agency deployed the robots early Friday (Sept. 21), but JAXA waited until today (Sept. 22) to confirm the operation was successful and both rovers made the landing safely. The rovers are part of the MINERVA-II1 program, and are designed to hop along the asteroid's surface, taking photographs and gathering data. In fact, one of the...

NASA Hubble's designers prepared for gyroscope failure by equipping the observatory with a backup. Unfortunately, when one of Hubble's gyroscopes conked out in early October, the backup didn't work as expected -- it was rotating too fast and hence won't be able to hold the telescope in place when it needs to stay still and lock in on a target. NASA has since been able to reduce its rotation rates and fix its issues by implementing an age-old fix for malfunctioning electronics: turning it off and on again. Back to science! @NASAHubble is well on its way to normal...

The satellite’s owner, Iridium, confirmed that it was indeed a component of their spacecraft, and more specifically it was a piece of the defunct Iridium Satellite #70, which had been in orbit for two decades. As with all satellites, the spacecraft eventually reentered Earth’s atmosphere, where it was expected to be completely destroyed. Somehow, this rather large piece of the spacecraft managed to survive the intense inferno and tumbled all the way down to an unsuspecting farmer’s walnut orchard.