News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The world’s most powerful space telescope on Saturday blasted off into orbit, headed to an outpost 1.5 million kilometres (930,000 miles) from Earth, after several delays caused by technical hitches. The James Webb Space Telescope, some three decades and billions of dollars in the making, left Earth enclosed in its Ariane 5 rocket from … Read more
Astronauts on the International Space Station shared a festive message for people on Earth as they prepare to spend the holidays in orbit. Expedition 66 crew members, including NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, Kayla Barron, and Mark Vande Hei, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, will be celebrating … Read more
Since early this year, skywatchers on Earth have been tracking Comet Leonard, a kilometer-wide dirty snowball made of ice, rock, and dust. Now, as it heads towards a close encounter with the Sun on 3 January 2022, several spacecraft – with the distinct advantage of having an unobstructed front-row seat to the action – have … Read more
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be more extreme than its famous predecessor in a variety of ways, including its cosmic locale. The $10 billion Webb is considerably bigger, more complex and more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been studying the heavens from Earth orbit for more than three decades. And the new … Read more
Earth and Mars likely arose from collisions between giant moon-size rocks instead of the clumping together of tiny pebbles over time, a new study found. Previous research suggested there may be two primary ways in which rocky planets such as Earth are built. The classic model proposes that moon-to-Mars-size rocks dubbed planetary embryos once regularly … Read more
If creepy crawlies make you uncomfortable, be glad you weren’t living in the Carboniferous period (around 100 million years before the dinosaurs arrived) in what is now Northumberland in the UK. Scientists have made an astonishing discovery along this part of the coast of northeast England: a 326 million-year-old fossil, showing traces of the … Read more
Last year, Japan’s Hayabusa 2 asteroid explorer returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu, and now the first analysis of the rock shows it has a primitive composition and a curiously dark colour Space 20 December 2021 By Alex Wilkins Artist’s impression of Hayabusa 2 near Ryugu Akihiro Ikeshita The asteroid Ryugu contains some of the … Read more
It’s been over a year since the Hayabusa2 probe delivered its precious cargo of dust from an alien space rock, and we’re finally getting a more detailed glimpse of what makes up asteroid Ryugu. In two papers published today, international teams of scientists have revealed that, in accordance with analyses conducted by the probe … Read more
The picturesque and remote Faroe Islands sit in the North Atlantic, between Norway and Iceland, around 200 miles (322 kilometers) northwest of Scotland. Today, almost 54,000 people live on the archipelago, but it seems the first inhabitants arrived a lot earlier than previously thought. From the earliest archaeological structures on the Faroes, we know … Read more
A Japanese billionaire and two colleagues will return to Earth from the International Space Station on Sunday (Dec. 19), and you can watch the whole thing live. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Yusaku Maezawa, along with spaceflight participant (and video producer) Yozo Hirano and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, is scheduled to touch down on the … Read more