Science

Planning for the Ultimate Space Mission

Planning for the Ultimate Space Mission

As a child, I remember gazing up at the stars and dreaming of spacecraft journeying to distant worlds, those classic images of rockets blasting off toward unknown frontiers filled my imagination. But a mission to a black hole? That seemed beyond even the wildest science fiction. These stellar corpses were the stuff of theoretical physics books back then, mysterious objects …

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How many years NASA’s Voyager-1 will take to exit our solar system?

How many years NASA’s Voyager-1 will take to exit our solar system?

Key numbers used Voyager 1 speed ≈ 17 km/s (typical quoted value). 1 astronomical unit (AU) = 149,597,870.7 km. 1 year ≈ 365.25 days and 1 day = 86,400 seconds. Convert Voyager speed to AU per year (digit-by-digit) Seconds per year = 86,400 × 365.25 = 31,557,600 s. Distance per year = 17 km/s × 31,557,600 s = 536,479,200 km/year. …

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When will Voyager 1 go silent and what are NASA’s plans for its final days?

When will Voyager 1 go silent and what are NASA’s plans for its final days?

Communication depends on Voyager’s 3.7-metre high-gain antenna transmitting narrow, low-power X-band radio signals. Those signals are captured by NASA’s Deep Space Network, three arrays of huge dishes in California, Spain and Australia, which amplify and decode the faint transmissions. The probe transmits slowly and in short bursts, storing data onboard and sending it in low-rate streams that the DSN reconstructs …

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Light pollution is encroaching on observatories around the globe – making it harder for astronomers to study the cosmos

Light pollution is encroaching on observatories around the globe – making it harder for astronomers to study the cosmos

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Outdoor lighting for buildings, roads and advertising can help people see in the dark of night, but many astronomers are growing increasingly concerned that these lights could be blinding us to the rest of the universe. An estimate from 2023 …

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A Bridge Of Lost Stars Betrays Two Giant Galaxies In The Midst Of Destruction

A Bridge Of Lost Stars Betrays Two Giant Galaxies In The Midst Of Destruction

Astronomers have captured the first optical evidence of a million-light-year-long bridge of stars being torn from one massive galaxy and pulled into another, a rare galactic interaction occurring in the Abell 3667 galaxy cluster, located about 700 million light-years from Earth. The discovery, published August 5 in The Astrophysical Journal, reveals a dramatic cosmic merger between two galaxy clusters, each …

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