Category Archives: News and Updates

News about Astronomy and Space Science. Find every news item and update here, in blog format. You can get these updates sent straight to your mailbox by subscribing here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the link.

US Airforce Launches Secret Spaceplane

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The US Airforce launched the secretive X-37B spaceplane late yesterday on its first full test mission.  Although details of the mission are classified, the launch was made public and could be viewed via live webstream.  Originally commissioned by NASA as a rescue craft for the International Space Station (ISS), the project was later abandoned and taken over by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the speculative research (read:  Mad Scientist) department of the US military.  DARPA’s earlier projects include gigantic airborne lasers … Continue reading →

Seven more years for Cassini

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Two years of hard work by NASA orbital engineers have allowed the team behind the Cassini mission to add another seven years to the probe’s already astonishing career.  Six years into the mission and with only 22% of it’s fuel remaining, a new mission has been drawn up allowing it to continue exploring Saturn and it’s systems of rings and planets.  To achieve such longevity with so little fuel requires some very careful navigation, eking the maximum advantage from gravitational … Continue reading →

Huge fireball streaks over USA

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At around 10:00 PM, something entered the atmosphere over the american midwest, and burned up in a spectacular fireball.  It has stirred up a great deal of comment amongst the public, but if astronomers seem uninterested it is because such events are actually quite commonplace.  We had a very similar fireball here in South Africa only a few months ago, and there have been several around the world since then.  In fact, it is believed that a meteoroid of half … Continue reading →

Hubble captures stunning image of M66

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M66 is a spiral galaxy, and is part of the Leo triplet, a group of three interacting galaxies in the constellation Leo (pictured below).  The sixty sixth entry in Charles Messier’s famous catalogue of Things That Aren’t Comets, it has an unusual asymmetric shape, with spiral arms arcing over the main disc and an off-centre nucleus.  This is probably a result of gravitational interaction with the other two members of the group, which has also resulted in unusually high rates … Continue reading →

Saturn’s Great Hexagon replicated in lab

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Saturn is well known for its rings, and remains the single most impressive sight an astronomer can show off through his telescope eyepiece, but astronomers have discovered that it has many other fascinating aspects.  Most surprising of all was the discovery of a perfect giant hexagon encircling it’s North Pole.  Like all the Gas Giants, Saturn has a number of horizontal ‘belts’ marking out the various atmospheric jet-streams, but the most north belt is permanently distorted into a hexagon, and nobody … Continue reading →