Daily News update on – Science

Spaceflight Now

NASA’s Orion spacecraft fired its main engine Friday to slip into a distant lunar orbit, putting it on course to range farther from Earth than any of the Apollo astronauts flew in humanity’s first exploration missions to the moon.

Space.com

Orion is an uncrewed journey around the moon to let NASA engineers assess the spacecraft’s readiness ahead of human missions, which are currently planned to begin with the crewed Artemis 2 mission looping around the moon in 2024 or so.

Space.com

Stretching like a celestial bridge across space, Arp 248 — also known as Wild’s Triplet — is a spectacular sight for keen-eyed astronomers. The Hubble Space Telescope offers a new view of the mesmerizing trio in a photo released on Oct 31 that shows …

CNN

A previously unknown dinosaur with a remarkably flat head lived around 70 million years ago on an island home to dwarfed prehistoric creatures. Discovered in what’s now western Romania, the Transylvanosaurus platycephalus (flatheaded reptile from …

Space.com

The James Webb Space Telescope isn’t the only observatory peering deep into nebulas and taking captivating infrared images of them. The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) has captured this …

Phys.Org

NASA made history on November 16 when the Artemis I mission took off from Launch Complex 39B at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on its way to the moon. This uncrewed mission is testing the capabilities of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft in …

Phys.Org

The rise of tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) is one of the iconic evolutionary transitions preserved in the fossil record. These animals, which lived about 385 to 320 million years ago during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods of Earth’s history …

MIT News

An international group of researchers, led by a team at MIT, spent more than four years tackling this problem of high-speed optical beam forming. They have now demonstrated a programmable, wireless device that can …

The Verge

The Artemis I mission isn’t the only lunar mission happening this month. On Wednesday, November 30th, a SpaceX Falcon 9 is expected to launch a commercial Japanese lander called Hakuto-R to the Moon, carrying the United Arab Emirates Rashid rover.

Phys.Org

Researchers have been able to make some key determinations about the first galaxies to exist, in one of the first astrophysical studies of the period in the early universe when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as the cosmic dawn.