Tag Archives: Spacecraft

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The burgeoning space industry and the technologies society increasingly relies on – electric grids, aviation and telecommunications – are all vulnerable to the same threat: space weather. Space weather encompasses any variations in the space environment between the Sun and …

SpaceX just fired up its newest Starship spacecraft on Thursday (July 31), to help prep the vehicle for an upcoming test flight. The company conducted a “static fire” trial with the 171-foot-tall (52 meters) Starship upper stage at its Starbase site in South Texas on Thursday, briefly igniting one of the vehicle’s six Raptor engines. “Starship single-engine static fire demonstrating …

A new pre-print paper involving sometimes-controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has suggested a way we could intercept interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it hurtles through the Solar System.  On July 1, 2025, astronomers spotted an object moving through the Solar System at nearly twice the velocity of previous interstellar visitors ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov. The object, which was confirmed to be …

Earlier this month, astronomers noticed a mysterious object speeding toward the inner solar system from outside of our star system. It’s an exceedingly rare occurrence, marking only the third confirmed interstellar object to have ventured into our solar system, all of which have been detected since 2017. Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb was quick to raise the tantalizing — …

Earlier this month, astronomers noticed a mysterious object speeding toward the inner solar system from outside of our star system. It’s an exceedingly rare occurrence, marking only the third confirmed interstellar object to have ventured into our solar system, all of which have been detected since 2017. Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb was quick to raise the tantalizing — …

An Earth-orbiting spacecraft just experienced an unusual phenomenon: a lunar transit and an Earth eclipse on the same day. On July 25, at different times, both the moon and Earth passed between NASA‘s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the sun. SDO studies the sun‘s activity, including the solar wind (the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun), solar flares …

Zoom image will be displayed The Juno spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA) The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, 2025. It is expected to arrive at a distance of 53.6 million kilometers from Jupiter on March 16, 2026. In a new paper (accessible here) that I wrote with the brilliant Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl, we show that applying …

On its long journey to the outer solar system, NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft made a planned detour — and seized a striking photo opportunity.  In a single frame, the uncrewed Europa Clipper caught Mars alongside both of its tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, as they waltzed through space, all glowing in infrared light.  The image, presented below, is more than …

Blue Origin has announced a partnership with Scout Space, a company focused on orbital domain awareness and safety in space. Scout’s Owl sensor will be the first payload to fly on Blue Origin’s Blue Ring spacecraft, integrating the advanced space domain awareness (SDA) sensor into the payload delivery vehicle. The mission is expected to launch in Spring 2026, and will …

A carbon dioxide-mapping satellite and four Earth-observation spacecraft launched successfully tonight (July 25) from South America. A Vega C rocket, operated by the French company Arianespace, lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on schedule tonight at 10:03 p.m. EDT (11:03 p.m. local time in Kourou; 0203 GMT on July 26). The four-stage, 115-foot-tall (35 meters) Vega C …