Explorer

If you’re feeling isolated while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, consider the challenges astronauts must overcome while working in space.

A new company called Earth-i has announced it will be launching a constellation of satellites into Earth's orbit that will download "fast-turn-around pictures and colour video of the planet's surface."

When you read a scientific story in a popular blog or magazine, many times you will see the caveat "artist interpretation" next to some of the accompanying images. This as a gross undersell of the time, effort, and most important, accuracy, that goes into developing the renders. While we don't know what a black hole or an exoplanet looks like, it is important to attempt to visualize them, and to do it as accurately as possible. This video is an interview with two people who are responsible for

NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission has begun its final mission phase, making its first dive between the planet Saturn and its rings. It is the only craft to ever make that plunge. Check out some of the amazing images it took as it went through, including the north pole hexagonal vortex.

A short description of the upcoming Grand Finale of the Cassini Spacecraft. Over the next 5 months, Cassini will make 22 plunges between Saturn's rings and the planet itself. No craft has ever been that close. During this final phase, Cassini will make close up measurements of the rings for the first time, image the planet's cloud-tops in unprecedented detail, and even answer long-standing questions like: how fast does Saturn actually rotate? It's going to be a very interesting 5 months.

Human's have been launching satellites into space since 1957, and now the current number of objects in orbit larger than 10 cm is about 23,000. The growing number poses a real threat to the future of space exploration. Humanity will need to solve this problem moving forward, and ideas are currently being discussed.

Astronomers from Keele University, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and others, have discovered the first atmosphere around an Earth-sized planet. The planet, GJ1132b is about 1.4x Earth's diameter and 39 light years away from us. Currently there are over 3000 known planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, but only a handful of which have been confirmed to have atmospheres, and all of which are massive Jupiter-sized planets. In the ongoing quest to find a planet similar to Earth, this