The Milky Way in the sky of Ali Prefecture, southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Sept.27, 2018. (Xinhua/Purbu Zhaxi)
The star, named LAMOST J040643.69+542347.8, has an estimated rotational velocity of 540 km per second, which is about 100 km per second faster than that of the previous record holder, HD 191423.
BEIJING, April 9 (Xinhua) — A Chinese astronomer has discovered the fastest rotating star in the Milky Way galaxy based on data from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) located in Xinglong, in northern China’s Hebei Province.
Mercury has only been visited by two spacecraft so far… Credit NASA
The ESA probe BepiColombo flew past Earth on the way to Mercury. The probe launched in 2018 and made the last visit of our home before continuing onward to the final destination. The spacecraft needs to shed velocity to arrive at Mercury in 2025 at a velocity to enter orbit. The spacecraft will make multiple additional planetary flybys of Venus and Mercury to slow down to enter orbit.
In space travel, mission planners need to balance mission resources. The amount of fuel required to either speed up or slow down a spacecraft greatly impacts the cost of the mission. Using a longer flight path can reduce the propellent requirements for a mission but the mission will take longer. Gravity assists can, therefore, allow a spacecraft to be launched on a cheaper, less powerful rocket.
Gravity assist flyby?
A Gravity assist flyby has other names including a gravitational slingshot, gravity assist maneuver, or swing-by. Gravity assistance maneuvers increase or decrease its speed or redirect the orbital path. The spacecraft slingshots around another object with a gravitational field and transfers some of the energy during that slingshot. In the case of BepiColombo, the spacecraft needs to slow down to be captured by Mercury…
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission, a panoramic high-definition image of astronaut Fred Haise napping in the “lifeboat” Lunar Module has been produced.
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A lunar crater on the farside of the Moon could be turned into a new radio telescope resembling the Death Star from Star Wars, under new plans from NASA.
Funding for the project has come from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Programme, designed to support potentially game changing projects.
If the telescope is ever built it would be the largest open radio telescope in the solar system, according to the NASA team behind the idea.
You know the scene in “Akira” where Tetsuo rips a satellite space weapon out of orbit?
Now the U.S. military wants to try something similar, according to Defense One. The Pentagon is requesting hundreds of millions of dollars to ramp up space-based weaponry including particle beams and space lasers that’ll fire downward at Earthly targets — a dark vision of the militarization of space.
NASA is beginning to design its next big astrophysics mission, a space telescope that will provide the largest picture of the universe ever seen with the same depth and clarity as the Hubble Space Telescope.
Scheduled to launch in the mid-2020s, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will function as Hubble’s wide-eyed cousin. While just as sensitive as Hubble’s cameras, WFIRST’s 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument will image a sky area 100 times larger. This means a single WFIRST image will hold the equivalent detail of 100 pictures from Hubble.
