Space weather affects snowplow drivers carving through Thompson Pass in a whiteout, Iowa farmers dropping seeds of corn, and wedding planners who release white doves during the ceremony. These and other customers subscribe to daily forecasts from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. Rodney Viereck works there. He and his teammates monitor […]
Asteroid 2002 AJ129 will make a close approach to Earth on Feb. 4, 2018 at 1:30 p.m. PST (4:30 p.m. EST / 21:30 UTC). At the time of closest approach, the asteroid will be no closer than 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon (about 2.6 million miles, or 4.2 million kilometers). […]
A team working with ESO’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile has found that the red dwarf star Ross 128 is orbited by a low-mass exoplanet every 9.9 days. This Earth-sized world is expected to be temperate, with a surface temperature that may also be close to […]
NASA’s newest communications antenna became operational today following a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Alaska Satellite Facility in Fairbanks. The antenna will increase the agency’s communications support to Earth-observing missions. NASA spacecraft collect massive amounts of scientific data every day, but there are no fiber cables or internet hookups in space. How do they transmit that […]