technical updates

When the 11,000-ton cruise ship Le Boréal set sail from Nice, France, on Thursday, Aug. 6, its 205 passengers and 136 crew members began a voyage whose success would depend not only on careful planning, but also on the ship's ability to outmaneuver clouds at the last critical hour. The ship is owned and operated by the French cruise line Compagnie du Ponant. This eclipse cruise was the result of more than a year's planning by Ponant, and most of those who signed on were there specifically to witness the celestial spectacle; that shared purpose heightened the drama of the eclipse itself. This was going to be a sunset eclipse, with the sun no more than three degrees above the horizon. To picture that height, make a fist and hold it out at arm's length. Place the bottom of your fist on the horizon; the top of your fist measures about ten degrees. During totality, the sun would appear on...

If you have ever shared a room with multiple people for days on end, you may know how clothes and living conditions can rapidly turn rather smelly. Imagine that happening in a confined spacecraft. Even worse, since water on a space mission is in short supply, space travelers can't easily do their laundry. This is more than a body odor problem — unclean clothes and linens are ripe feeding grounds for infectious bacteria. Astronauts might wear the same clothes for days or even weeks, seal away used clothes in airtight bags , then return them to Earth for cleaning or cast them away to burn up in Earth's atmosphere. This is fine for short trips near Earth, but what about a months-long odyssey to Mars ? Engineers have devised a new way for astronauts to dry-clean their dirty laundry. They've crafted a prototype "laundry gun" that sterilizes fabric by shooting violet-colored pla...

Despite our love for little "Baby Yoda", " The Mandalorian and Grogu " wasn't the thrilling "Star Wars" feature film to drag fans back to theaters when it dropped back in May. It wasn't bad, but it felt more like a TV special than a cinematic event. But now the $166 million space opera — recruited from the Disney+ series that ran for three seasons from 2019-2023 — is now about to enter Earth orbit and finally land in the streaming sphere when it hits Disney+ starting Sept. 2, 2026. Will this be the way? Directed by Jon Favreau and starring Pedro Pascal as the laconic bounty hunter clad in his stylish Beskar armor and also featuring that pint-sized alien dynamo formally known as Baby Yoda, "The Mandalorian and Grogu" was the first big-screen "Star Wars" movie in seven years since 2019's " Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ." C...

Astronomers have discovered that a jet of plasma erupting from a distant supermassive black hole at near-light-speed is being gravitationally lensed by an unseen clump of dark matter. The discovery could tell us about the source of cosmic "ghost" particles called neutrinos. The supermassive black hole in question is powering a type of quasar called a blazar. All quasars involve supermassive black holes surrounded by vast quantities of material upon which the black holes feed. Material that isn't consumed by these feasting cosmic titans is channeled to the poles of the black holes, from where it is blasted out as plasma jets. A blazar differs from quasars in general because the jets it blasts out are directed at Earth. Blazars, like the one central to this study, designated PKS 2233-148, have long been proposed to be the cosmic particle accelerators that blast out neutrinos. Neutr...

Astronomers have discovered an unusually massive, dense exoplanet that challenges conventional ideas about how rocky planets form. Called GJ 523b, the exoplanet is about 2.5 times wider than Earth but packs roughly 23 times our planet's mass into that relatively compact size. Worlds this large and dense are sometimes referred to as "mega-Earths," an informal term for unusually massive, predominantly rocky planets. GJ 523b's high density suggests it contains relatively little atmosphere despite being large enough that astronomers would normally expect it to have accumulated a substantial gaseous envelope, according to a statement from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. "This isn't what we expected at all," Max Kroft, lead author of the study, said in the statement . "Dense planets like this aren't uncommon, but they're usually small rocky planets sim...

China just notched another big spaceflight milestone. The Beijing startup LandSpace successfully landed the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket this evening (Aug. 18), becoming the first Chinese company ever to do so during an orbital launch. It was just the second Chinese orbital rocket touchdown overall. The first was pulled of on July 10 by a Long March 10B , which is built by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The Long March 10B had some help returning to Earth, settling softly into a net-like device affixed to a ship at sea. But Zhuque-3 came down on terra firma and stayed upright thanks to a set of landing legs, like those sported by SpaceX 's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. "This mission marks China's first-ever successful recovery attempt of the first stage of an orbital-class launch vehicle using landing legs, and China's first success...