Category Astronomy/Space

With a trio of smaller satellites that can each detect 26 wavelengths of light and thermal energy, the Landsat Next mission is expected to look very different from its predecessors that have been observing Earth for 50 years. This new plan for Landsat Next, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is designed to provide more frequent, and finer resolution, data of the changing surface of Earth.

“I think this is going to be a phenomenally capable instrument, with the biggest leap in Landsat capability since Landsat 4,” said Bruce Cook, NASA Landsat Next Project Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is basically the first chance we’ve had to completely re-conceive the Landsat mission.”

The Landsat series of satellites h...

Astronomers say they have solved an outstanding problem that challenged our understanding of how the universe evolved—the spatial distribution of faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

These satellite galaxies exhibit a bizarre alignment—they seem to lie on an enormous thin rotating plane—called the “plane of satellites.”

This seemingly unlikely arrangement had puzzled astronomers for over 50 years, leading many to...

Recent observations of a black hole devouring a wandering star may help scientists understand more complex black hole feeding behaviors.

Multiple NASA telescopes recently observed a massive black hole tearing apart an unlucky star that wandered too close. Located about 250 million light-years from Earth in the center of another galaxy, it was the fifth-closest example of a black hole destroying a star ever observed.

Once the star had been thoroughly ruptured by the black h...

The UK’s national synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source, was used by a large, international collaboration to study grains collected from a near-Earth asteroid to further our understanding of the evolution of our solar system.

Researchers from the University of Leicester brought a fragment of the Ryugu asteroid to Diamond’s Nanoprobe beamline I14 where a special technique called X-ray Absorption Near Edge Spectroscopy (XANES) was used to map out the chemical states of the elements within the asteroid material, to examine its composition in fine detail...