News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A unique archaeological study of crew culture within the International Space Station (ISS) will focus on the orbiting habitat as a “microsociety in a miniworld.” This inside look at the ISS, called the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP), is expected to supply new insight into human life in space and issues of habitation design. … Read more
NASA’s International Space Station team is eager to stick with the orbiting laboratory until 2030. NASA officials speaking at a virtual meeting held on Tuesday (Jan. 18) spoke about plans to take advantage of an extension to the International Space Station program that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced on Dec. 31. The meeting was held … Read more
The ongoing volcanic eruption in Tonga began in December 2021, but it wasn’t until 5:15 pm local time on January 15, 2022, that the powerful explosion occurred. It generated an enormous cloud of ash, earthquakes, and tsunamis that reached as far as the distant coastlines of Peru on the other side of the Pacific. … Read more
Russia’s new multi-port docking module at the International Space Station is now ready to receive its first spacecraft after two cosmonauts completed a seven-hour spacewalk. Anton Shkaplerov, commander of the space station’s Expedition 66 crew, and Pyotr Dubrov, both of Roscosmos, exited the orbiting outpost on Wednesday (Jan. 19) to run cables to and configure … Read more
NASA’s massive new observatory has notched another milestone. After nearly a full month in space, the James Webb Space Telescope, also known as JWST or Webb, is nearly at the end of its deployment work. The complicated series of deployments has seen the telescope transform from its tightly-folded launch configuration to what looks like a … Read more
China executed its first launch of 2022 with a classified mission, the Shiyan 13 test satellite. The Long March 2D rocket carrying Shiyan 13 launched from the China National Space Administration‘s (CNSA) northern Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center Tuesday (Jan. 17) at 10:35 a.m. local time (0235 GMT, or 9:35 p.m. EST on Jan. 16) The … Read more
Two Russian cosmonauts are planning to take a spacewalk today (Jan. 19) to ready a new International Space Station module for visiting spacecraft, and you can watch it live. Expedition 66 Cmdr. Anton Shkaplerov and flight engineer Pyotr Dubrov, both of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, will spend the day working together outside the International … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope continues to fine-tune its mirrors to ultimately peer into the deep and distant universe. The telescope launched Dec. 25 with the 18 hexagonal segments of its primary mirror and its secondary mirror folded up and stowed so that the components would survive the rigors of liftoff. Now, the telescope is … Read more
Our list of the best asteroid movies has crashed to Earth, but which of them made the deepest impact? A fictional threatening comet or asteroid provides perfect fodder for a science fiction film. Happily, NASA and its partners scan the skies regularly for threatening small bodies and so far, in real life, they have found … Read more
What are space and time? Where do they come from? Physicists have treated them as fundamental properties of the universe, but scientists are finding intriguing evidence that they could just be expressions of something even more fundamental. Author Adam Becker, in our cover story takes us on a romp through this mind-bending research that could potentially … Read more