technical updates

We now have a launch date for Starship's most ambitious mission to date. SpaceX announced today (Sept. 15) that it's targeting Sept. 22 for the first orbital flight of Starship , the fully reusable megarocket that the company is developing to help humanity settle the moon, Mars and more. Liftoff, from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas, will occur during a 75-minute window that opens at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT and 7:15 a.m. local Texas time). You can watch it live here at Space.com when the time comes. Starship Die Cast Rocket Model Was $47.99 Now $39.99 on Amazon . Even if you can't see SpaceX's Starship in person, you can score a model of your own. Standing at 13.77 inches (35 cm), this is a 1:375 ratio of SpaceX's Starship as a desktop model. The materials here are alloy steel and it weighs just 225g. View Deal The upcoming flight will be the 14th overall for Sta...

Could we find alien technology embedded in moon dust? The bold idea, not yet peer-reviewed, suggests checking out the lunar surface for "microscopic technosignatures." The SETI Institute — or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute — describes these technosignatures as "tiny engineered particles" that may have come from interstellar space before settling on the moon . The institute recently highlighted a paper on the topic, published on arxiv in August, and added the research is undergoing peer review for consideration in the International Journal of Astrobiology. The study is led by SETI Institute Affiliate Scientist Lewis Pinault. "The moon has been quietly accumulating material from space for billions of years, much of it likely billions of years older than the moon itself," said Pinault in a statement . "We're asking whether that ancien...

More than 60 years after surveys suggested a deep coral reef off Benin was probably dead, scientists have found it alive. Cameras revealed healthy-looking coral patches supporting multiple fish species more than 50 meters beneath the surface. The discovery suggests West Africa’s coastal waters may contain other overlooked reefs that have yet to be documented. from Latest Science News -- ScienceDaily https://ift.tt/pbdXkNu

If this summer felt hotter than usual, you're not alone. As it turns out, this past summer was the hottest on record in the United States. This is the hottest that summer in the U.S. has been in at least 132 years. Specifically, the temperatures rose to 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.67 degrees Celsius) above average, beating out the most recent record set in 2021 of 0.4 degrees F (0.22 degrees C) above average, according to a new report from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And looking month-to-month, this was also the hottest August we've ever seen. The record-breaking season saw unmatched temperature highs across the contiguous U.S. (all of the adjoining states, excluding Alaska and Hawaii which just aren't a part of this record) from June through August. But scorching temperatures aren't all that this new record reveals, as this summer was also one of the drie...

It has now been just over a year since the comet 3I/ATLAS first captured the world's attention as the third known object to fly through our solar system from beyond. Astronomers are still learning new things about where exactly it came from. For the first time ever, they've been able to study charged particles in the tail of the interstellar comet . This has told them that 3I/ATLAS contains more nitrogen than the typical comet from our own solar system — revealing a tantalizing clue about how the strange comet formed. "Finding that it's so rich in nitrogen tells us it likely formed in extremely cold conditions, far from its home star," Lea Ferellec, a research fellow at Northumbria University, said in a statement . Ferellec's group used the William Herschel Telescope in Spain's Canary Islands. One of this telescope's instruments is a fiber-optic weave named,...

Two European Earth-observing spacecraft will lift off from South America tonight (Sept. 14), and you can watch the action live. A Vega C rocket carrying the FLEX and Copernicus-3C satellites is scheduled to launch from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 9:21 p.m. EDT (10:21 p.m. local time in Kourou and 0121 GMT on Sept. 15). You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of the European Space Agency , or directly via ESA . Coverage will begin at 8:50 p.m. EDT (0050 GMT). A Vega C rocket is scheduled to launch ESA's FLEX satellite and the Copernicus Sentinel-3C spacecraft from French Guiana on Sept. 14, 2026. (Image credit: ESA-M. Pédoussaut) The 875-pound (397-kilogram) FLEX will detect and monitor vegetation fluorescence, which explains its name (a shortening of "Fluorescence Explorer"). By doing so, it will map plant photosynthetic activity — something no sate...