technical updates

Twenty-four Starlink satellites reached low Earth orbit on Tuesday (July 21), a day later than originally scheduled due to a last-second rocket engine abort. SpaceX at first tried to launch the broadband internet relay units on a Falcon 9 rocket on Monday morning (July 20), but an unexpected engine cutoff at the point of ignition scrubbed the day's attempt . The company did not provide a reason for the abort. By Tuesday, whatever the problem was had been addressed and the Falcon 9 was ready to fly. It liftoff off at 10:49 a.m. EDT (1449 GMT; 7:49 a.m. PDT local time) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. About an hour later, after a normal ascent, the new Starlink batch ( Group 17-39 ) were deployed into their intended orbit. "Deployment of 24 Starlink satellites confirmed," SpaceX posted on social media . Previous Booster B1082 missions: ...

Picture it: A slash of vivid green light splits the starry sky. There for a moment and then gone, leaving nothing but a short-lived glowing trail and a moment of pure joy. You've finally caught it, your first Perseid shooting star of the season. What you saw was the final moment of a story billions of miles and thousands of years in the making. A story that began with that same shooting star locked inside the icy body of the wandering comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The 16-mile-wide (26 kilometer) giant of a comet spends its life journeying back and forth between the outer and inner solar system, where its frigid body is heated by the sun , triggering dramatic outbursts of activity. While in close proximity to our star, ice near to the surface of the comet is transformed into gas, skipping the water stage entirely as it escapes out into the vastness of interplanetary space. Embedded within that i...

Separated by billions of miles and shaped by very different environments, Saturn's smoggy moon Titan and the dwarf planet Pluto have, on paper, little in common. Titan is a geologically active world cloaked in an atmosphere denser than Earth's, its landscape shaped by seas of liquid methane and vast dunes built from organic particles that rain out of its skies. Pluto, by contrast, is a frigid outpost with a tenuous atmosphere hovering above an icy, frozen surface. Yet, observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed these two disparate worlds share an identical, unexplained infrared signature on their surfaces — a sign that similar chemistry may be unfolding on both worlds despite their stark differences, scientists say. Detailed in a new study , the feature appears at precisely the same infrared wavelength on both Titan and Pluto, indicating that it absorbs light...

Half a century after first putting hardware down on Mars, NASA is looking to explore the Red Planet's skies. On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander touched down in the western reaches of Chryse Planitia (the "Golden Plain"), a large circular landform that lies 22.5 degrees north of the Martian equator. It was the first-ever Mars landing for NASA. Viking 1, along with its twin Viking 2, went on to conduct the first fully successful mission on the Red Planet's surface. (The Soviet Union's Mars 3 probe survived its touchdown attempt on Dec. 2, 1971 but died less than two minutes later.) And those missions have left a rich and intriguing legacy. The first color image ever captured on the surface of Mars. NASA's Viking 1 lander took this photo on July 21, 1976. (Image credit: NASA) Viking 1 and Viking 2 — which touched down in a different Red Planet region on Sept. 3, 1976 ...

Scientists have discovered a hidden warning sign of skin damage that appears before collagen fibers visibly thin, break, or lose their connections. Using advanced light-based techniques, the team found that collagen’s carefully organized molecular “handedness” can collapse even while the tissue still appears structurally intact and contains the same amount of collagen. This suggests that skin may begin deteriorating at a much deeper level long before conventional imaging can detect a problem. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/VcdA5Lm

The costs of space launch have fallen 96% in the past six decades and have the potential to plummet by nearly as much by 2040, a new study finds. However, such an improvement might get hampered by a number of challenges, such as the rise of space debris in orbit or a single company monopolizing commercial space launch , researchers added. Although previous analyses of space launch suggested that costs had dropped over time, one major problem with these prior studies was that they "considered the cost of the rockets , but not how much they launched during their lifetimes," study co-author Francesco Nicoli, an associate professor of political economy at the Politecnico University of Turin in Italy, told Space.com. This meant this earlier work failed to accurately track the average costs of reaching space. Before commercial launch: A NASA Saturn V rocket launches on May 14, 1973, carrying...