NASA

Saturn will have one of its best viewing opportunities of the year in the period surrounding Sunday, Aug. 14. Or it would, if the nearly Full Moon doesn’t spoil our fun. On that date, Saturn will reach opposition – the point where it lies directly opposite the Sun in our night sky – around midnight local time for most stargazers, with the constellation Capricornus behind it. Saturn will be visible for much of the night, rising above the southeastern horizon and lingering high in the southern sky. This will occur during Saturn’s perigee – its closest approach to Earth – making it even larger and brighter than usual. An illustration of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, where it documented the ringed planet in 2017. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) But as previously noted the last blog, ...

Our Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is coming together at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida this summer. Our mighty SLS rocket is set to power the Artemis I mission to send our Orion spacecraft around the Moon. But, before it heads to the Moon, NASA puts it together right here on Earth.Read on for more on how our Moon rocket for Artemis I will come together this summer:How do crews assemble a rocket and spacecraft as tall as a skyscraper? The process all starts inside the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy with the mobile launcher. Recognized as a Florida Space Coast landmark, the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, houses special cranes, lifts, and equipment to move and connect the spaceflight hardware together. Orion and all five of the major parts of the Artemis I ro...

TOKYO — SpaceX says it will not be able to recover the 20 Starlink satellites left in a very low orbit after a malfunction of a Falcon 9 upper stage on a July 11 launch. In a statement July 12, the company said that the 20 satellites on the Group 9-3 launch have been unable to raise the orbit because the electric propulsion systems on the spacecraft cannot counteract the high atmospheric drag the satellites encounter in their very low orbits. The rocket’s upper stage engine “experienced an anomaly and was unable to complete its second burn,” the company stated, which would have circularized the orbit of the stage before satellite deployment. While the stage was able to deploy the satellites, they were left in an orbit with a perigee, or low point, of just 135 kilometers. ...

A bright meteor flew through the skies over northern Utah on Saturday morning, later raining down meteorites over the Great Salt Lake. Residents of the Salt Lake City area were startled by loud booms at 8:30 a.m. MDT on Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022. Eyewitnesses saw a fireball in the sky, 16 times brighter than the full Moon. GOES 17 Geostationary Lightning Mapper detection of the Aug. 13, 2022, fireball over northern Utah. Credits: NOAA Approximately 22,000 miles out in space, NOAA’s Geostationary Lightning Mappers (GLM) onboard the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 17 and 18 detected the meteor, which was first seen 50 miles over West Valley City. However, it is difficult to pinpoint its exact trajectory. “Daytime fireballs are very tough to analyze,” said Bill Cook...

On June 10, people in parts of the northern hemisphere will have the chance to witness a solar eclipse.Watch the full visualization of the eclipse.The June 10 eclipse is an annular solar eclipse, meaning that the Sun will never be completely covered by the Moon. The Moon’s orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle, so throughout each month, the Moon’s distance from Earth varies. During an annular eclipse, the Moon is far enough away from Earth that the Moon appears smaller than the Sun in the sky. Since the Moon does not block the entire view of the Sun, it will look like a dark disk on top of a larger, bright disk. This creates what looks like a ring of fire around the Moon.People in the narrow path of annularity — which, for this eclipse, cuts through Canada, Greenland, and northern...