It seems that in recent years, asteroids have been flying past Earth with increasing frequency. Does it mean that more asteroids are coming around? Is it the beginning of the end? Will one of them hit us soon and doom us all? Probably not, but there’s always a chance. It’s almost certain that the reason we’ve been able to find so many new asteroids, and especially near-Earth asteroids, is because of the technology increase in Astronomy the past few years. New telescopes and tracking methods exist with the sole purpose of finding near-Earth asteroids, somewhat of an early warning system...
About 170 years ago, a star nearly exploded in the Southern constellation Carina. I say nearly for a few reasons. On Earth, observers saw a dim, seemingly-average star become the second brightest star in the night sky. It stayed that way for 20 years before slowly fading. When we looked at it with telescopes, we found that whatever happened to Eta Carinae, it ejected more than 30 times the mass of our Sun in that short twenty year period, creating what we now call the homunculus nebula. Eta Carinae is a multiple star system 7500 light years away from Earth, so rest assured any...
It’s been a rough week in the space flight industry. On Friday afternoon, a test flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo class VSS Enterprise resulted in a catastrophe, crashing down in the Mojave desert, killing one pilot, with the other ejecting and now being treated in hospital. During the test flight, launched by Virgin Galactic’s partner corporation Scaled Composites from the Mojave Spaceport, WhiteKnightTwo, an aircraft designed to bring SpaceShipTwo to launch altitude, successfully released the spacecraft. After two minutes, something went wrong, resulting in the eventual crash of the craft. Virgin Galactic released a statement shortly after the accident, saying the National...
I was blown away to hear this news just a few hours after the launch. The Antares rocket exploded on the launchpad just six seconds after launch. Yesterday’s post discussed how the Antares-Cygnus resupply launch was delayed by a lone man in a boat who had no clue he was in the blast zone. First of all, it’s important to note that no one was hurt, including all personnel on site and in the control room. This was an unmanned rocket, so the major loss was the resupply capsule and its cargo, not to mention the loss of the $250...
