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In 1969, the Apollo 10 crew ejected the lunar module, named Snoopy, from the command module into orbit, never to be seen again – or so they thought Astronomer Nick Howes, along with flight controllers, space dynamics experts and astronauts from the Apollo program, have spent years looking for it The team believe they may have found the four-meter wide vehicle Now all they need is someone with the expertise to go and retrieve it The Apollo 10 mission was a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 moon landing, which took place two months later in July 1969

A team of astronomers are planning an epic quest to track down the 42-year-old lunar module that's adrift in the solar system. It's not often I read about a new project that leaves me undecided whether it's totally crazy or a stroke of genius. I was recently sent a press release of such a project and, having read it over a few times, I think I'm leaning toward the latter. The idea is the brain child of British amateur astronomer Nick Howes who not only has a passion for hunting for asteroids, but also for the Space Race -- in...

It's not often I read about a new project that leaves me undecided whether it's totally crazy or a stroke of genius. I was recently sent a news release of such a project and, having read it over a few times, I think I'm leaning toward the latter. The idea is the brain child of British amateur astronomer Nick Howes who not only has a passion for hunting for asteroids, but also for the Space Race — in particular, the Apollo era.

On June 27, the asteroid will approach at a distance of around 0.01715 astronomical units. It hasn't been this close since at least 1600 CE. Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) seen by the Virtual Telescope Project, when it was around 10.5 million kilometers (6.5 million miles) from Earth. Image credit: Gianluca Masi/The Virtual Telescope Project Potentially hazardous asteroid 152637 (1997 NC1) is about to make its closest approach in over 400 years, in an event only seen once every decade. At these distances, and given the size of the asteroid, it should be possible to view using a small...

The uncertainty of science: In two somewhat self-righteous press releases today from two different academic organizations, scientists who have been for three decades touting the somewhat uncertain evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, thus requiring the ad hoc creation of something they label “dark energy” to explain it, insisted that their theory is still right despite publication of a paper last year that said their evidence was weak and unconvincing. The headlines of the first press release is especially insulting to the very concept of the scientific method: - Royal Astronomical Society: ‘Crisis averted’ as experts confirm...

The Parker Solar Probe this past week successfully completed its 28th close fly-by of the Sun, zipping past its surface at a distance of only 3.8 million miles. During this solar encounter, which started June 3 and ends Saturday, June 13, Parker’s four scientific instrument packages gathered data from inside the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona. Parker will begin returning detailed spacecraft telemetry on June 14, with science data transmission set to run from Wednesday, June 17 to Tuesday, June 30. …Parker also equaled its record-setting speed of 430,000 mph — a mark that, like Parker’s distance to the Sun, was...

Last year NASA bought the space mission equivalent of a lottery ticket, a small bet on a mission which has the odds stacked against it, but could be a win on many levels. This is the last TriStar, launching the last Pegasus, carrying a never before flown spacecraft that offers the Swift telescope's last chance to avoid destruction. NASA offered a small contract to attempt a mission to re-boost an old telescope which would otherwise burn up, $30million seemed too small, but Katalyst stepped up with work they'd already been doing on satellite servicing, and in the process they got...

A massive, semi-continent-sized subsurface structure has been discovered by scientists beneath Antarctica’s frozen surface. The discovery, reported by an international team of scientists, reveals the presence of an unusually shaped feature which researchers with Durham University’s Department of Geography characterize as a “vast geological structure hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.” The discovery was recently detailed in a study featured in Nature Geoscience. A Massive Fan-Shaped Structure Composed of several gigantic basins located beneath more than three kilometers of the southern continent’s icy exterior, the unusual structure has been dubbed the “East Antarctic Fan-shaped Basin Province.” The massive feature...

The search for a ninth planet in our solar system could reach a turning point as soon as this year, according to a planetary scientist involved in the hunt for a mysterious object believed to be lurking in the outer reaches of the Solar System. For the past decade, astronomers around the world have been searching for evidence of another resident in our planetary neighborhood. As far back as 2016, there were already hints that something might be out there, given the odd orbits of distant objects like Sedna, discovered in 2003. Now, two astronomers—California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers...

A slice of NWA 12774.The green circle is an olivine crystal, a magnesium-rich mineral. (Credit: John Kashuba) In A Nutshell A meteorite recovered from the Sahara contains crystals that could only have formed deep inside a large, now-destroyed ancient planet, giving scientists their first direct physical evidence of its enormous size. Using a newly developed pressure-measuring tool, researchers calculated the parent body was at least 1,000 kilometers in radius, far larger than any asteroid previously linked to this class of meteorite. Textural clues in the crystals suggest the planet may have been Moon-sized or even larger, though that conclusion depends...

The culprit behind all three eruptions from the sun is Earth-facing sunspot region 4455. The unstable region produced an M9.3 solar flare that peaked at 9:36 p.m. EDT June 2 (0136 a.m. GMT on June 3), followed by an M7.9 flare at 3:00 a.m. EDT (0700 GMT) and an X1 at 7:28 a.m. EDT (1128 GMT) — the most powerful category of solar flare. The trio of eruptions triggered radio blackouts across Earth. The M9.3 flare triggered a moderate R2 radio blackout across parts of East Asia and Australia, while the M7.9 eruption caused another R2 blackout affecting portions of...

The Sun runs on an 11-year cycle of rising and falling activity, tracked mainly by counting sunspots – the dark patches scattered across its surface. Solar Cycle 25, the current cycle, was forecast as mild, and the sunspot count agreed. But those counts read only the surface. A global network of six telescopes has listened to the Sun’s interior for nearly 40 years, and what it is now telling researchers is not what the surface suggested at all. Listening inside the Sun Scientists have a name for eavesdropping on those sound waves: helioseismology. The waves are trapped inside the Sun,...

The concept of the Einstein-Rosen bridge is often understood as a cosmic shortcut, akin to a tunnel that links distant points in spacetime. While that image makes for compelling science fiction, a new study shows that it does not match the actual physics behind this concept. Recent research suggests that the original bridge theory was not a wormhole but a mathematical feature of how time is structured. This new realization could help solve a persistent problem in physics. The study, led by Professor Enrique Gaztañaga from the University of Portsmouth, along with K. Sravan Kumar and João Marto, was published...

Is it free woolly? Scientists were flabbergasted after discovering that the mammoth backbones that had been housed in an Alaskan museum for 70 years actually belonged to a whale, per a study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science. This archaeological case of mistaken identity began way back in the 1950s, when archaeologist Otto Geist happened upon some bones while traveling through the Alaskan interior, roughly 10 miles North of Fairbanks in a region formerly known as Beringia, The Smithsonian Magazine reported. He assumed the remnants, a pair of growth plates, belonged to the plush pachyderm mammoth based on their...

Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA/J. Pollard Image Processing: D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) =============================================================================== In A Nutshell A 37-member international team produced the most precise direct measurement of the Hubble constant ever recorded, with just 1.1 percent uncertainty. By linking a dozen different cosmic distance measurement methods into a single “Distance Network,” they confirmed the universe is currently expanding at about 73.5 kilometers per second per 3.26 million light-years. That rate conflicts with what the Big Bang’s ancient afterglow predicts by more than seven times the margin of error, a gap that makes a simple measurement mistake increasingly implausible. Resolving...

A team from Vienna and Frankfurt has found a formula describing a strange phenomenon: space and time can form a kind of “crystal” that may turn into a black hole.Alongside the famous gigantic black holes, physics also allows for microscopic versions. They emerge from so-called critical states, when spacetime organizes itself into a regular, crystal-like structure during a process known as critical collapse. A team from Goethe University Frankfurt and TU Wien has now succeeded, for the first time, in describing this phenomenon with an exact mathematical formula using an unusual mathematical trick. Black holes usually form in spectacular events,...

For more than two centuries, scientists have tried to determine one of the most important numbers in physics: the universal gravitational constant, known as "big G." It defines the strength of gravity throughout the universe, influencing everything from falling objects on Earth to the motion of galaxies. Yet despite its importance, researchers still cannot agree on its exact value. That uncertainty weighed heavily on Stephan Schlamminger, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as he prepared to open a sealed envelope containing a crucial secret number. For nearly 10 years, Schlamminger had devoted much of his...

President Trump took a victory lap late Saturday after a prominent international climate change panel backed off using some of the most aggressive doomsday estimates after determining that they were not the most plausible outcomes. The United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had quietly adjusted its modeling framework of a 4–5°C warming by 2100 last month. That framework had underpinned a myriad of other analyses predicting terrifying consequences for greenhouse gas emissions. “GOOD RIDDANCE! After 15 years of Dumocrats promising that ‘Climate Change’ is going to destroy the Planet, the United Nations TOP Climate Committee just admitted that...

A hefty, never-before-seen asteroid is racing toward Earth at around 20,000 mph (32,000 km/h) and will zoom past our planet closer than some satellites on Monday (May 18), scientists say. You can watch the unusually close encounter for yourself, even if you don't have access to stargazing equipment. The asteroid, dubbed 2026 JH2, was discovered May 10 by astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, who also spotted the superbright Comet Lemmon last year. The space rock, which has since been verified by other observatories across the globe, likely circles the sun every 3.7 years on an elliptical...

The Jiuzhang 4.0 can manipulate and detect 3,050 photons at once, which is 10 times more than its predecessor. Jiuzhang 4.0, China’s latest photonic quantum computer, is staking a claim to quantum supremacy. The photonic supercomputer completed a complex calculation in microseconds, which the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10^42 years to complete. Often referred to as the next frontier of computing, quantum computers are being sought to complete calculations that are impossible for classical computers. Scientists hope that quantum computers will help us solve problems like climate change and accelerate drug discovery. At the core of quantum computing are...