Daily News update on – Science

Space.com

“Lego City Space toy playsets come with feature-rich models inspired by real NASA machines, vehicles and spacecraft, plus inspiring astronaut characters for imaginative, open-ended play based on real-life space missions,” Lego wrote on its website.

Space.com

China has formally approved three missions targeting the south pole of the moon, with the first to launch around 2024. The missions dubbed Chang’e 6, Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 will launch across the 2020s, each with different goals and an array of …

Space.com

A year after its last launch, Russia’s newest rocket lifted off again — and things didn’t go entirely according to plan. The third test flight of the Angara A5 rocket took off from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Russia on Monday (Dec. 27).

CNN

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. (CNN) Heading to space was just the beginning for the James Webb Space Telescope.

The New York Times

America was a nation divided, but that did not stop it from building parts of the James Webb Space Telescope in a red state and testing them in a blue one. The European Union and Russia were facing off over Ukraine and other issues this year, …

Space.com

The James Webb Space Telescope is one step closer to finishing the deployment of its massive sunshield. On Wednesday (Dec. 29), the huge new space observatory successfully extended its deployable tower assembly (DTA), a 48-inch-long (1.2 meters) shaft …

Space.com

NGC 1755 is in good company: the Pleiades is another example of a small stellar cluster.

Spaceflight Now

Webb’s Deployable Tower Assembly moved the telescope’s mirrors, still folded up in their launch configuration, away from the spacecraft bus. The telescope structure contains Webb’s 18 gold-coated hexagonal primary mirror segments and four infrared …

Phys.Org

The astronomers made use of a spread of simulation to explore different possibilities of inner planet evolution. Our solar system’s inner regions are a rare, but possible outcome of that evolution. The results have been published in Nature Astronomy.

CNN

(CNN) Shrimplike creatures, an extinct dinosaur called the “hell heron” and colorful beetles are among the 552 new species described this year by scientists at the Natural History Museum in London.