Forum

This historic flight has ended spectacularly! Splashdown! NASA’s Orion Returns to Earth After Historic Moon Mission Congratulations to the whole team!

A fantastic view of our tiny little Blue Marble after the Outbound Powered Flyby!

Congratulations to the whole team!

The live coverage will start on November 21st 2022. at 12:15 UTC!

This is awesome! What an amazing accomplishment! Congratulations to the whole team!

What You Need to Know About NASA’s Artemis 1 Launch

Here is the full article: Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

NASA won't set a target launch date for Artemis 1 until the next "wet dress rehearsal" is done and the resulting data analyzed. But, August is mentioned as the likely earliest available timeframe at this point! NASA will try again to fuel Artemis 1 moon rocket in June as launch slips to August

NASA's Artemis moon rocket just rode a 'supertank' to the launch pad Congratulations to each and every member of the team! The "wet dress rehearsal" will take place on April 1!

I am eagerly waiting for Thursday, March 17th! The rollout of the gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) mega rocket and Orion spacecraft will begin at 21:00 GMT. The immense Crawler-Transporter 2 will carry the rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to the Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a 6.4 km long journey that will last approximately 11 hours! There will be a live coverage at space.com and NASA TV! Here are the latest details: All systems go for rollout of NASA's Artemis 1 moon rocket this week

For me, it is fascinating how big or how small astronomical objects can be... For example, the mean diameter of Halley's Comet is 11 km (11 kilometres). Compare that to the diameter of our closest Andromeda Galaxy: about 220 kly (220 000 light-years)!. Yet, even small near-Earth objects, if they are fast enough, can cause disaster on our tiny, precious, vulnerable planet, our Blue Marble, This illustration depicts those which can be dangerous: This illustration shows the relative size of some well-known astronomical objects! The largest object on one of them is the smallest one on the next! The first two of them show only the planets in our Solar System - then come some well-known stars: Proxima Centauri or α Centauri C is the nearest star to our Solar System, 4.25 ly (light-years) away, Sirius or α Canis Majoris is the brightest star of the night sky, 8.71 ly away. Pollux or β Geminorum is 33.78 ly away. Arcturus or α Bootis is 36.7 ly away. Aldebaran or α Tauri is 65.3 ly away. Rigel or β Orionis is 863 ly away. Antares or α Scorpii is 550 ly away. Betelgeuse or α Orionis is 548ly away. Sirius, Pollux, Aldebaran and Rigel are part of the beautiful Winter Hexagon asterism which can be seen with the naked eye in this, winter part of the year. Betelgeuse is inside the hexagon! You can use this site to help to locate it: Interactive Sky Chart | Map Your Night Sky - Sky & Telescope Betelgeuse is a Red Giant, it is due to become a Supernova very soon, maybe during our lifetime! It is as big as the inner Solar System!

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) has released a new MeerKAT telescope image of the centre of our Galaxy, showing radio emission from the region with unprecedented clarity and depth. Here is the complete article: New MeerKAT radio image reveals complex heart of the Milky Way In the centre of our Milky Way galaxy is a supermassive black hole, with a mass of 4 million times the mass of our Sun! Just for comparison: The mass of our Sun is 1047.3 times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our Solar system! The mass of Jupiter is 317.8 times the mass of our Earth!

source: https://www.photopills.com/articles/astronomical-events-photography-guide

Take a look at this picture! There are so many types of interesting, fascinating, weird, dangerous and frightening astronomical objects in our Solar system, in our Milky Way galaxy and in intergalactic space. Which one is yours? Can the newly discovered GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3 cosmic object become your favourite? It is something never seen before, located in our galactic neighbourhood, only 4000 light-years away! Here are the details; Astronomers detect powerful cosmic object unlike anything they've seen before

Today, on January 24th 2022., engineers plan to instruct NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to complete a final correction burn that will place it into its desired orbit, nearly 1.5 million kilometres (1 million miles, 0.01 Astronomical Units) away from the Earth at what is called the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, or “L2” for short! The article is here: Webb’s Journey to L2 Is Nearly Complete

I was always fascinated by these names... The rarest of them all is the Blue Moon - the additional full moon in a month. We will have the next Blue Moon on August 31st 2023!

- ... But ... Where is everybody? It was Enrico Fermi, the famous nuclear physicist who formulated this well-known question! In the summer of 1950, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, he was going to lunch with his colleagues, Emil Konopinski, Edward Teller and Herbert York and they had a casual conversation about extraterrestrial intelligent life. After sitting down for lunch, and when the conversation had already moved on to other topics, Fermi suddenly blurted out, "Where is everybody?" (Teller's letter), or "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" (York's letter), or "But where is everybody?" (Konopinski's letter). A great number of arguments indicate that there should be a plethora of intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations in the Universe! There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun. With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets in a circumstellar habitable zone. Many of these stars, and hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If the Earth is typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago. Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are investigating now. Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years. Since many of the stars similar to the Sun are billions of years older, Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes. However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened! (source: Wikipedia, Fermi paradox) There have been many attempts to explain the paradox, some of them are presented in this picture: What do you think, members of the Club of the Space?

... or something else? Please tell us your story, members of this very special Club of the Space!!!