Saturday, October 11

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SpaceX

NASA, Boeing and ULA announce June 1 as new target date for Starliner’s Crew Flight Test – Spaceflight Now

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was fueled for launch May 6, 2024 for the Starliner Crew Test Flight. Image: NASA TV NASA is looking at the start of June for its next attempt to launch its astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, on board Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. The announcement came last Wednesday night in a blog post, stating that June 1 will be the earliest that the Crew Flight Test of Starliner can begin. The new launch date has a T-0 liftoff of 12:25 p.m. EDT (1625 UTC). There are also backup opportunities available on Sunday, June 2; Wednesday, June 5; and Thursday, June 6. The May 6 launch date was originally scrubbed about two hours prior to launch due to an issue with an oxygen pressure release valve on the upper stage of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket....
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Quantum to cosmos: Why scale is vital to our understanding of reality
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Science

Quantum to cosmos: Why scale is vital to our understanding of reality

It can be hard to wrap our minds round the very large and the very small. Ron Koeberer/Millennium Images, UK Imagine setting off on a spacecraft that can travel at the speed of light. You won’t get far. Even making it to the other side of the Milky Way would take 100,000 years. It is another 2.5 million years to Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbour. And there are some 2 trillion galaxies beyond that. The vastness of the cosmos defies comprehension. And yet, at the fundamental level, it is made of tiny particles.”It is a bit of a foreign country – both the small and the very big,” says particle physicist Alan Barr at the University of Oxford. “I don’t think you ever really understand it, you just get used to it.” Still, you need to have some grasp of scale to have ...
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SpaceX to launch first batch of satellites for the NRO’s reconnaissance satellite constellation – Spaceflight Now
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SpaceX

SpaceX to launch first batch of satellites for the NRO’s reconnaissance satellite constellation – Spaceflight Now

An illustration of the NROL-146 mission patch design. Graphic: NRO The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is set to start building a constellation of unknown size with a middle-of-the-night launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The mission, dubbed NROL-146, features an undisclosed number of satellites riding onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) is set for the start of a launch window that opens 1 a.m. PDT (4 a.m. EDT, 0800 UTC). Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about 30 minutes prior to liftoff. The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, tail number B1071 in the SpaceX fleet, will launching for a 16th time. It’s first two flights were for NRO missions and it also launched a pair of Transporte...
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Resolving Messier 3’s swarming stars – Astronomy Now
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Astronomy

Resolving Messier 3’s swarming stars – Astronomy Now

Messier 3 is a great globular cluster of the late-spring sky. Image: Adam Block. During late spring or early summer—whichever term you choose, likely depending on how fine the weather has been—is the best time to seek out and observe globular clusters, which are among the most striking and impressive categories of deep-sky objects. Globular clusters are densely-packed, near spherical collections of ancient stars that populate mainly the extended outer halo of our galaxy. They are believed to have formed in the very early life of our Galaxy, over 11 billions years ago; Messier 3 is thought to be 11.4 billion years old. Astounding star densities exist inside even run-of-the-mill globulars; on average, 0.4 stars per cubic parsec (a parsec is equal to 3.26 light years), rising to 100 to 1,000...
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