Space

Over a decade ago, NASA picked Boeing to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station, agreeing to pay billions of dollars for up to a half-dozen crewed flights. Some of those flights, it turns out, may not happen, and the next Starliner to fly won’t carry any astronauts at all. NASA on Monday (Nov. 24) announced that Boeing’s next Starliner mission to the International…

A nearby binary star system is bereft of giant planets, but scientists think it may still be a decent place to look for life. Binary star system Eta Cassiopeiae, located just 19 light-years away, could be a good target in the search for habitable exoplanets, according to a recent study. University of California, Riverside astronomer Stephen Kane and his colleagues simulated the orbital dynamics of…

A stealth solar storm hit Earth on Nov. 20. It arrived without warning and may have contributed to auroras visible at mid latitudes. This event didn’t trigger a geomagnetic storm; however, such solar storms, or coronal mass ejections (CMEs), are still exciting because they erupt almost undetected and disrupt the solar wind conditions around Earth. They are generally more common when the sun…

A history-making robotic rescue mission scheduled to launch next year will fly on a rocket dropped from a plane. In September, NASA announced that it has chosen Arizona company Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the altitude of its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a space telescope whose orbit has gotten dangerously low since its November 2004 launch. Today (Nov. 19), we learned how…