Category: space.com

Game Of Thrones executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will create a new series of Star Wars films separate from both the ongoing Skywalker saga of the core films and Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson’s planned trilogy of original films.

“David and Dan are some of the best storytellers working today,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm. “Their command of complex characters, depth of story and richness of mythology will break new ground and boldly push Star Wars in ways I find incredibly exciting.”

“In the summer of 1977 we traveled to a galaxy far, far away, and we’ve been dreaming of it ever since,” Benioff and Weiss said. “We are honored by the opportunity, a little terrified by the responsibility, and so excited to get started as soon as the final season of Game of Thrones is complete.”

No story details or projected release dates for the films were announced.

Four posters spotlighting the core cast of Lucasfilm’s Solo: A Star Wars Story have been released following the debut of the film’s first teaser trailer.

Solo is scheduled for release May 25.

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This image shows how star KIC 3542116 looks to the Kepler space telescope. Cooler colors represent darker regions, and warmer colors represent brighter regions.

The flat-Earth rocketeer remains planet-bound.

“Mad” Mike Hughes, a flat-Earth conspiracy theorist who has managed to get significant attention for his now-repeated failed rocket launches, strapped himself into his second homemade rocket Saturday (Feb. 3). But, as Noize TV documented in an excruciating 11-minute livestream of the event, Hughes’ rocket never left its pad.

His stated plan, as Live Science previously reported, is to launch himself 1,800 feet (550 meters) above the desert in California and take photos before bailing out in a parachute. These photos, shot from a height anyone can reach by climbing a very tall building or even a small mountain, will, Hughes claims, show that the Earth is flat.

In fact, it’s pretty easy for anyone to show that the Earth is round with a simple experiment — though the planet’s curvature doesn’t become visible to the naked eye until a height of about 35,000 feet (10,700 m).

Hughes canceled his previous launch after the Bureau of Land Management caught wind that he planned to crash his rocket into public land. In a video posted to YouTube, Hughes claimed that Saturday’s failure resulted from a faulty plunger or a blown o-ring. However, he added that the details will remain unclear until the rocket cools down and he opens it up to examine it in detail.

Hughes went on to say that the launch could still happen this week — though he does have to be in court Tuesday because he’s suing a range of California officials, from Gov. Jerry Brown to U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.

“It’s just aggravating,” he told a small crowd of reporters. “I mean, what do you do?”

Originally published on Live Science.

Tomorrow is a very big day for private spaceflight, and for space exploration in general.

If all goes according to plan, SpaceX’s huge new Falcon Heavy rocket will launch for the first time ever tomorrow (Feb. 6), rising off Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a three-hour window that opens at 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT). You can watch the liftoff live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via SpaceX.

The powerful Heavy is a potentially transformational vehicle, spaceflight experts say, so its maiden flight will be watched carefully and eagerly by many sets of eyes. [In Photos: SpaceX’s 1st Falcon Heavy Rocket Readies for Launch]

“It’s a tremendous, monumental milestone for SpaceX and the commercial industry,” Eric Stallmer, president of the nonprofit Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF), told Space.com. “This is a changing moment.”

A long road

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced the company’s plans to develop the Falcon Heavy in 2011. Back then, he predicted it could be flying as early as 2013.

Such optimism didn’t seem unreasonable at the time. After all, the 230-foot-tall (70 meters) Heavy is basically an extension of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 launcher: It links two Falcon 9 first stages to a central core, which itself is a modified Falcon 9. 

“At first, it sounds really easy: Just stick two first stages on as strap-on boosters. How hard can that be?” Musk said at a conference last summer.

The answer? Pretty hard, actually.

“But then everything changes,” Musk explained. “All the loads change, aerodynamics totally change; you’ve tripled the vibration and acoustics.”

So it took a while for the Falcon Heavy to come together. But come together it has, and the launcher is now ready for its debut — a shakeout cruise that will attempt to deliver a cherry-red Tesla Roadster into a highly elliptical orbit around the sun. (Musk also runs the electric-car company Tesla.)

That orbit will bring the car close to Mars from time to time. This is a nod to Musk’s long-stated goal of helping humanity settle the Red Planet, as is the Roadster’s color. (SpaceX is already developing the Heavy’s successor — a giant Mars-settling rocket-spaceship combo called the BFR.)

There’s no guarantee that things will go according to plan tomorrow, of course; maiden launches of new rockets don’t always go so well. Indeed, Musk has taken pains to lower expectations for the Heavy’s debut.

“I hope it makes it far enough away from the pad that it does not cause pad damage,” he said at that conference last summer. “I would consider even that a win, to be honest.”

A failure tomorrow probably wouldn’t have too big an impact on SpaceX or the Heavy’s future, provided the company figures out what went wrong and fixes it in short order, said Scott Hubbard, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal New Space.

“I wouldn’t see that as a showstopper,” Hubbard, who also restructured NASA’s Mars-exploration program after several high-profile failures in the 1990s, told Space.com. (Disclosure: Hubbard has an affiliation with SpaceX. He chairs the company’s commercial-crew safety panel.) [SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Rocket in Images] 

Reasons for excitement

The Falcon Heavy will be capable of lofting more than 70 tons (63.5 metric tons) of payload to low-Earth orbit (LEO), and nearly 29.5 tons (26.8 metric tons) to geostationary transfer orbit, according to SpaceX’s spec sheet. 

The Heavy will therefore be the most powerful American rocket since NASA’s famous Saturn V, which launched astronauts to the moon back in the Apollo days.

That immense power is part of the reason for all the excitement. Another factor is the Heavy’s low price tag: $90 million. For comparison, the most powerful rocket operating today — United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy, which can loft nearly 32 tons (29 metric tons) to LEO — costs between $300 million and $500 million, said CSF Executive Director Tommy Sanford.

“The difference in using a Falcon Heavy versus a Delta IV Heavy — you can buy an entire other satellite,” with the savings, Sanford told Space.com.

SpaceX has also developed the Heavy to be compatible with crewed missions. In fact, the company announced last year that it had signed a deal to fly two as-yet-unnamed people on a trip around the moon before the end of 2018, using the Falcon Heavy and the company’s Dragon capsule. (SpaceX also holds a contract to fly NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, but those taxi trips will involve the Falcon 9.)

So, the Heavy could help open up lots of spaceflight opportunities, from crewed moon missions to the robotic exploration of deep-space targets such as Saturn’s potentially life-supporting moon Enceladus, experts say.

“This isn’t just a new tool,” Stallmer said. “It’s a whole new toolbag.”

A new era

The Falcon Heavy isn’t the only big new rocket on the horizon. Blue Origin, the spaceflight company run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is developing its own heavy-lifter, known as New Glenn. That powerful launcher is on track to start flying in the 2020s, company representatives have said.

And NASA is building a megarocket called the Space Launch System (SLS). The SLS and its companion Orion capsule will help astronauts get to deep-space destinations like Mars, agency officials have said. Like New Glenn, SLS is expected to fly for the first time in 2020.

If all three rockets do get up and running soon, space exploration could take a big leap, Hubbard said.

“There’s nothing like competition to open up opportunities,” he said. “Having multiple heavy lifts out there may finally — after discussing this for decades — push the space community past the inflection point where there just weren’t enough launches to make it routine.”

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, FacebookGoogle+. Originally published on Space.com.

One day before SpaceX’s new Falcon Heavy rocket is slated to blast off on its maiden voyage with a Tesla Roadster on board, Elon Musk has revealed that the electric sports car may have a passenger.

In a series of Instagram photos captioned “Starman in a Red Roadster,” Musk debuted a dummy wearing an official SpaceX spacesuit, buckled up and apparently ready to blast off on a mission to Mars.  

With no additional details given, Musk seems to be implying that this “Starman” will travel aboard the Falcon Heavy. The rocket is slated to lift off tomorrow (Feb. 6) at 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Visit Space.com for complete coverage of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test flight this week. You can watch the liftoff live here at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via SpaceX. [In Photos: SpaceX’s 1st Falcon Heavy Rocket Readies for Launch] 

Musk announced in December that the Tesla Roadster will head to Mars, playing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on full blast the whole way there. Keeping with the Bowie-inspired theme to this mission, Musk nicknamed the dummy “Starman” after Bowie’s 1972 hit.

Visit Space.com for complete coverage of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test flight this week.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

When SpaceX launches its first Falcon Heavy rocket this week, the company is going to attempt something never done before: a rocket landing triple play.

SpaceX representatives confirmed over the weekend that the Falcon Heavy test flight on Tuesday (Feb. 6) will also include landings for its three first stage core boosters, which are based on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT) from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“Following booster separation, Falcon Heavy’s two side cores will return to land at SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2 (LZ-1 & LZ-2) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida,” SpaceX representatives said in a statement Saturday (Feb. 3). “Falcon Heavy’s center core will attempt to land on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.”[In Photos: SpaceX’s 1st Falcon Heavy Rocket at the Pad]

SpaceX has landed Falcon 9 rockets 21 times on land or its robotic drone ships, and reflown boosters six times, as part of the company’s reusable rocket program. The heavy-lift Falcon Heavy rocket is part of that program, with its three first stage cores equipped with landing legs and grid-like fins to control their re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket stands atop Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket’s debut launch is scheduled for Feb. 6, 2018.

Credit: SpaceX

Residents in Central Florida may actually hear the Falcon Heavy boosters during their landing attempt, SpaceX advised.

“There is the possibility that residents of Brevard, Indian River, Orange, Osceola, Seminole, and Volusia counties may hear one or more sonic booms during the landing attempts,” SpaceX representatives said. “Residents of Brevard County are most likely to hear one or more sonic booms, although what residents’ experience will depend on weather conditions and other factors.”

Florida’s Space Coast Office of Tourism estimates up to 100,000 spectators are visiting the area to watch the Falcon Heavy launch, according to a Florida Today report.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket is billed as the most powerful rocket since NASA’s Saturn V moon rocket and can launch payloads of up to 119,000 lbs. (57 metric tons) into space. The rocket can carry twice as much payload as its nearest competitor, the United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy booster.

For this first flight, the Falcon Heavy will launch SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s own Tesla roadster. If all goes well, the midnight cherry red electric car will launch on a trajectory that will send it near Mars, Musk has said.

Musk’s Tesla even has a passenger: a dummy called Starman, which sits in the car’s driver’s seat. Musk posted photos of the mannequin on Instagram today (Feb. 5).

Musk has said repeatedly that there is a fair chance this maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy could fail.

“There’s a lot that could go wrong there,” he said last year. “I encourage people to come down to the Cape to see the first Falcon Heavy mission; it’s guaranteed to be exciting.”

Visit Space.com for complete coverage of the SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy test flight this week.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A close-up of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot taken by the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno probe, and color-enhanced by citizen scientist Jason Major.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has swirled for hundreds of years, but the source of its distinctive color remains a mystery. New laboratory experiments are working to produce that color — and others found in Jupiter’s stormy cloud tops — here on Earth, and researchers have found that radiation and temperature play key roles in changing the color of some of the transparent material found in the clouds.

A primary suspect in coloring Jupiter’s clouds is ammonium hydrosulfide, a type of salt. Formed by ionized ammonium and bisulfide, it quickly decomposes at typical atmospheric conditions and temperatures on Earth, making it challenging to investigate its properties.

“Models predict that ammonium hydrosulfide is the third most abundant cloud component [on Jupiter], behind ammonia and water,” Mark Loeffler, an astrochemist at Northern Arizona University, told Space.com by email. Loeffler worked with fellow chemist Reggie Hudson, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, to attempt to re-create the color of Jupiter’s clouds in the laboratory. [Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: An Iconic Monster Storm in Pictures]

The scientists have run about 200 experiments on ammonium hydrosulfide in an attempt to match the color of the Great Red Spot. After hitting the salt with simulated cosmic rays, they compared them to observations made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

“This work took a bit because there is not much published on this compound, and there appeared to be a lot going on in the sample,” Loeffler said.

The Great Red Spot’s great mystery

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, imaged by the Voyager 1 probe in 1979.

Credit: NASA

With winds as high as 400 mph (644 km/h), Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been brewing for at least 150 years. Astronomers in the 1600s identified a blurry feature on Jupiter that may have been the spot, but scientists aren’t certain that it was the same storm. In recent years, the storm has shrunk to the width of a single Earth. Previously, it was estimated to be three Earths wide. At the same time, observations showed that the color of the spot has been changing, suggesting that its composition may also be shifting.

Though ammonium hydrosulfide is present in Jupiter’s atmosphere, Loeffler said, it doesn’t exist as a gas. Instead, it must be condensed as grains of salt that are mixed with or coat another material.

By itself, ammonium hydrosulfide is transparent and colorless. But in Jupiter’s clouds, the salt doesn’t sit in isolation. Cosmic rays, the high-energy radiation traveling through space, bombard the planet and its clouds. These rays, which come from outside the solar system and even outside the Milky Way galaxy, can change the color of many salts, as previous experiments have revealed.

To determine how ammonium hydrosulfide reacted to radiation, Loeffler and Hudson first had to cool the sample holder to temperatures where the salt would remain stable as a solid. Then, they sprayed ionized ammonia and hydrogen sulfide into the sample holder, where the two components reacted to produce the salt. Next, the researchers used a particle accelerator to bombard the sample holder with protons to represent cosmic rays impacting the cloud. Throughout the process, the researchers monitored the ice and collected images in both visible and ultraviolet light. Most of the nearly 200 iterations of that experiment took what Loeffler called “a long day,” though some ran overnight.

Loeffler summed up the process in a single word: “fun.”

The researchers found that varying the temperature of the “cosmic rays” affected the color of the salt. At low temperatures of minus 263 degrees Celsius (minus 505 degrees Fahrenheit) and minus 223 degrees C (minus 370 degrees F), the salts became orange or reddish orange. At higher temperatures of minus 153 degrees C (minus 244 degrees F) and minus 113 degrees C (minus 172 degrees F), the salts turned green. The researchers attributed that greenish tint to sulfur. Only a small fraction of sulfur has been identified in the clouds, however, at smaller ratios than those found in the salts produced in the lab.

Samples of ammonium hydrosulfide hit by simulated cosmic rays vary in color from red to green. From leftTop left,: S sample at 10 Kelvin; top right, sample at 50 Kelvin; bottom left, sample at 120 Kelvin; bottom right, sample at 160 Kelvin.

Credit: Mark Loeffler/Cosmic Ice Laboratory, NASA GSFC

That provides an interesting challenge, Loeffler said, because the Great Red Spot is thought to have a temperature closer to those that produce the greener salts, though the clouds clearly are red.

“It would be nice if the red colors we see at low temperatures could be [responsible for] the Great Red Spot, but those are probably too cold,” Loeffler said.

So what role does ammonium hydrosulfide play in coloring Jupiter’s legendary storm? The researchers still aren’t certain. The visible color of the ammonium hydrosulfide (whether red or green or something in between) is determined by the wavelength of light that the compound emits, but the full profile of light coming from the compound includes wavelengths beyond just that visible range.

So the researchers are comparing that full wavelength profile of ammonium hydrosulfide at different temperatures and doses with the full profile of light coming from Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Although the ammonium-hydrosulfide ice at low doses and low temperatures makes a “reasonable match” to what has been observed on the planet at some wavelengths, it doesn’t match all the wavelengths scientists have seen in Jupiter’s storms. Ices irradiated at higher temperatures make a better overall match, but the wavelengths that create the greenish color are obviously a mismatch with what Hubble has seen.

“After comparison with this new low-temperature data, it seems evident that the best fit of a single [ammonium sulfide] ice is one that has been irradiated and warmed up to higher temperatures so as to remove the [sulfur] radical,” the researchers said.

Pointing to a 2016 study he worked on, Loeffler said warming the green samples to temperatures matching those found in the cloud layer of clear, unirradiated ammonium sulfide gets rid of the unattached sulfur ions and the greenish color. That study, along with another paper from 1976, focused on only a single temperature when the sample was irradiated. Along with the new research, which will appear in the March 1 issue of the journal Icarus, these are the only papers that report the results of laboratory work on ammonium hydrosulfide, according to the authors of the new study.

That’s because the instability of the salt makes it a challenge to work with, Loeffler said.

“Also, the material smells bad — think rotten eggs and cleaning solution,” he said. “For safety, all the excess material has to be vented out of the room, so no one breathes it.”

Jupiter, the giant of our solar system, is as fascinating as it is photogenic. How much do you know about the king of the planets?

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Jupiter Quiz: Test Your Jovian Smarts

Jupiter, the giant of our solar system, is as fascinating as it is photogenic. How much do you know about the king of the planets?

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Even worse, he said, the samples destroy lab components. “It really is not the best material to work with,” Loeffler said.

But that doesn’t deter the scientists. Now that they’ve studied how ammonium hydrosulfide changes over a range of doses and temperatures, the pair plans to include other compounds in their experiments that could contribute to the coloring of the Great Red Spot.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd at @NolaTRedd, Facebook, or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebookor Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Artist’s impression of the single-person spacecraft by Genesis Engineering Solutions.

Putting on a spacesuit is one of the most dangerous activities for astronauts. During spacewalks, there is little protection against micrometeoroids, which can puncture the protective suits. Occasionally, the suits themselves suffer failures that can threaten the life of the astronaut. 

To avoid this dangerous situation, what if astronauts could do activities that normally require a spacewalk with a maneuverable single-person spacecraft instead? That’s the vision that the Maryland-based company Genesis Engineering Solutions suggests could work for future missions, including missions to NASA’s proposed Deep Space Gateway near the moon. 

In the company’s proposed spacecraft design, the vehicle would be attached to the larger station or living space, and all an astronaut would need to do is shinny through the bottom of the spacecraft to get inside it. It would be equipped with little robot arms to do repairs, and lots of fuel to zoom to even distant areas of the space station.

Genesis recently completed “fit testing” of its spacecraft design at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The test involved placing a cage modeled as the spacecraft inside a large pool (to imitate the microgravity environment), and having scuba-diving volunteers in a range of sizes try to fit into the mock spacecraft, stand on its footrests and handle joysticks that control the robotic arms, all while looking through an opening where the spacecraft window would be. 

The company now is focusing on more “long-lead” items, said project manager Brand Griffin in an interview with Space.com. Engineers are designing the pressurized-crew enclosure, with the aim of building and testing it. They’re also planning ground tests of the propulsion system. If the company had all the money in the world, Griffin said, they could have a working prototype doing a test flight in three years. But realistically, their timeline depends on who is interested in the technology.

“There are people in NASA that love this thing, and others that don’t — we’re aware of that,” he said. “A lot of times, disruptive change like this [spacecraft] represents comes with a little bit of headwind.”

This cutaway view of the single-person spacecraft shows the crew enclosure, the servicing systems and an exterior view.

Credit: D. Keim/Genesis Engineering Solutions

But Griffin — who used to work as a senior engineer supporting the Advanced Concepts Office at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville — is keeping up conversations with NASA. And Genesis is working on the single-person spacecraft project with Sierra Nevada Corp., creators of the robotic Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft that the company is preparing to send to the International Space Station. 

He also pointed out that over the decades, NASA itself has developed concepts for other types of vehicles like the single-person spacecraft. And he said Genesis is making use of NASA research in its design of the single-person spacecraft. For example, studies on the Skylab space station in the 1970s showed that astronauts tend to adopt a relaxed, almost fetal-like position when floating naturally in microgravity. The single-person spacecraft design makes use of this floating position to make the fit comfortable for future astronauts.

Decades of development

Fans of “Star Trek” may remember the 2009 reboot movie “Star Trek.” Spock Prime (Leonard Nimoy) is piloting a cute little single-person spacecraft called the Jellyfish when he is drawn into a wormhole that leads to an alternate timeline. Later, the younger Spock from the alternate timeline (Zachary Quinto) pilots this ship onto a collision course with an alien ship.

This science-fiction concept of a single-person spacecraft, however, dates back at least as far as the 1950s, Griffin said during a presentation at the Future In-Space Operations (FISO) Working Group seminar on Jan. 18. Wernher von Braun — who is best known for developing the Saturn V rocket that got astronauts to the moon — also envisioned a “bottle spacecraft” that could take single astronauts out into space.

Other concepts include the Remora (Bell Labs) in the 1960s, the Scout (University of Maryland) in the 2000s, and even something called the FlexCraft Cherry Picker (from NASA), which Mitchell researched while he was at Marshall. 

NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless making the first-ever tetherless spacewalk in the MMU “jetpack” in 1984.

Credit: NASA

Perhaps the most famous heritage technology is the Manned Maneuvering Unit, a sort of “jet backpack” that a few astronauts got to try in the 1980s. (Bruce McCandless, who died last month, is famous for his iconic picture in the MMU, backdropped by Earth.) 

The MMU allowed astronauts to venture far from the space shuttle; it was even used for satellite repairs. But after the Challenger shuttle explosion killed seven astronauts in 1986, NASA decided the MMU was unnecessary and ended the program, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Although the program is dead, the expertise still exists: MMU astronaut Robert Stewart is among the advisers helping Griffin with development of the single-person spacecraft.

Genesis has done its own development for about two years, Griffin said; back in 2016, the companyran a contest to integrate student designs into the spacecraft. Griffin estimates that between his company’s investments, advice from students and mentors, and in-kind contributions from entities such as the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, development of the spacecraft has taken tens of millions of dollars so far. 

Preparing for space

Griffin points to many advantages of the single-person spacecraft over a traditional spacesuit. The spacecraft will fit more body types than a spacesuit. Astronauts can do repairs without injuring their hands, which is a common problem for workers in spacesuits, he added. 

There are also areas on the International Space Station that will need servicing as the station ages that are hard for astronauts to reach, Griffin said. That’s either because there aren’t any foot- and handholds for the astronauts, or because the Canadarm, which can carry astronauts, can reach only so far. (Just ask NASA astronaut Scott Parazynski, who did a tricky ISS solar panel repair on top of the Canadarm2 robotic arm back in 2007.)

The spacecraft would also be flexible regarding destination. If astronauts want to go to the moon, the craft could work near the surface and avoid the corrosive lunar dust that can degrade spacesuits over time, Griffin said. Or, it could float by a small asteroid or moon such as Mars’ Phobos, which is too small for humans to safely walk on due to reduced gravity. 

“We’re picking and choosing our technology in terms of development,” he said. “We’d like to fly a demonstrator — a stripped-down version — and get up there [to space] very soon, and add capability as needed.”

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The big screen is up on the @Space_Station, and we are ready for the Big Game. Good luck to the @Patriots and @Eagles. #SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/116mr59VL5

— Joseph M. Acaba (@AstroAcaba) February 4, 2018

It’s official: Super Bowl LII is truly out of this world. That’s because even astronauts in space are watching the big game. 

NASA astronaut Joe Acaba on the International Space Station posted a photo on Twitter tonight (Feb. 4) showing the big game on the orbiting laboratory’s big projection screen, which allows astronauts to watch films and TV shows using a high-definition projector. The only question left is who are the astronauts rooting for in the football championship: The Philadelphia Eagles or the New England Patriots?

“The big screen is up on the @Space_Station, and we are ready for the Big Game,” Acaba wrote on Twitter. “Good luck to the @Patriots and @Eagles. #SuperBowl” [How to Tailgate Like an Astronaut]

Acaba is one of six crewmembers of the International Space Station (which coincidentally is the size of a U.S. football field from end to end). Also on board are NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Scott Tingle; Russian cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Anton Shkaplerov; and Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai.

Watching the Super Bowl means a really late night for the space station crew, which typically works on a schedule based on Greenwich Mean Time. Tthe kickoff for tonight’s game was at 6:30 p.m. EST. That’s 2330 GMT, or 11:30 p.m. for the station crew!

This isn’t the first time the astronauts have caught a major entertainment event in space. In December, the space station crewmembers watched “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” in space to see the latest adventure from a galaxy far, far away. 

Past astronaut crews have also followed the big game from space. In 2017, when the Super Bowl took place in Houston, NASA participated in a whole series of space and football events for the game, including making one of the longest football passes of all time in space (564,664 yards, or 516,328 meters).

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Three different rockets – one each from Russia, China and Japan – launched satellites into orbit over three days in back-to-back-to-back space missions. 

The launch triple play occurred between Thursday (Feb. 1) and Saturday (Feb. 3), and came one day after the U.S.-based company SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the GovSat-1 communications satellite into orbit from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 

A Russian Soyuz 2 rocket launches two Kanopus-V Earth observation satellites, and nine other smaller satellites, into orbit from the Vostochny Cosmodrome on Feb. 1, 2018.

Credit: Roscosmos (Russian Federal Space Agency)

Russia kicked off the international rocket rally Thursday with the launch of a Soyuz 2 rocket from its Vostochny Cosmodrome. The Soyuz 2 carried two Kanopus-V Earth observation satellites into orbit to monitor the planet from space. The mission also delivered 9 smaller satellites into orbit, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos. 

A Chinese Long March 2D rocket launches the Zhangheng 1 earthquake signal detecting mission from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Feb. 2, 2018.

Credit: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation

Up next was China, which launched a Long March 2D rocket on Friday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. That rocket carried the Zhangheng 1 satellite, which is designed to detect signals that might precede earthquakes from space to help earthquake prediction efforts. The mission, also known as the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite, is a joint project by the China National Space Administration and the Italian Space Agency, according to Spaceflight Now. 

The Long March 2D also carried six other satellites into orbit. According to Spaceflight Now, they include: the European cubesats GomX-4A (which will track ship and plane movements in the Arctic for the Danish Ministry of Defence) and the European Space Agency’s experimental GomX-4B; ÑuSat 4 and ÑuSat 5 microsatellites built for the company Satellogic in Argentina to monitor Earth; and two Chinese cubesats called FMN 1 and Shaonian Xing. 

That brings us to Saturday, where the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched a modified SS-520 sounding rocket from the agency’s Uchinoura Space Center. The rocket carried the tiny satellite TRICOM-1R, nicknamed “Tsuki” into orbit. 

TRICOM-1R is a cubesat designed to take photographs of Earth and beam observations back to Earth. It’s launch comes just over a year after JAXA’s first attempt to launch a small satellite on an modified SS520 sounding rocket failed. The satellite TRICOM-1 was lost in that Jan. 15, 2017 launch failure.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency successfully launched a modified SS-520 sounding rocket carrying the TRICOM-1R cubesat from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan on Feb. 3, 2018.

Credit: JAXA

Whew, what a week! The year 2018 is certainly off to a fast start with more launches to come over the next 11 months.

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A fast-moving asteroid will make a close flyby of Earth this Super Bowl Sunday (Feb. 4), but it poses no risk of hitting our planet, according to NASA.

The asteroid, called 2002 AJ129, will make its closest approach to Earth at 4:30 p.m. EST (2130 GMT), and will be about 2.6 million miles (4.2 million kilometers) from our planet at its closest point, NASA officials said. It’s traveling at a breathtaking speed of about 76,000 mph (122,310 km/h), faster than most near-Earth asteroids, they added.

But while asteroid 2002 AJ129 is classified as “potentially hazardous” by NASA, at no point now or during the next century does it pose an impact threat to Earth, NASA officials said. Asteroids are classified potentially hazardous if they are larger than 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter and are in orbits that approach within 4.65 million miles (7.48 million km) of Earth. [In Images: Potentially Dangerous Asteroids Tracked by NASA]

“We have been tracking this asteroid for over 14 years and know its orbit very accurately,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said in the statement. “Our calculations indicate that asteroid 2002 AJ129 has no chance — zero — of colliding with Earth on Feb. 4 or any time over the next 100 years.”

Asteroid 2002 AJ129 will make its closest approach to Earth on Feb. 4, 2018, at 4:30 p.m. EST (2130 GMT). At closest approach, the asteroid will be no closer than 10 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The space rock will be no closer than about 10 times the distance between the Earth and moon. (The average distance between the Earth and moon is about 238,855 miles, or about 384,400 km.)

Asteroid 2002 AJ129 is a mid-size asteroid that is somewhere between 0.3 miles and 0.75 miles (0.5 to 1.2 kilometers) across. It was discovered on Jan. 15, 2002 by astronomers with a then-NASA-sponsored Near Earth Asteroid Tracking project at the Maui Space Surveillance Site on Haleakala, Hawaii.

The asteroid’s unusually fast speed was likely caused by a its orbit, which brings 2002 AJ129 extremely close to the sun, whipping around the star at a range of 11 million miles (18 million km), NASA officials said.

You can see live views of asteroid 2002 AJ129 today here at the Virtual Telescope Project website here at 6 p.m. EST (2300 GMT).

Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.