Daily News update on – Science

Spaceflight Now

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket fires away from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida with two U.S. Space Force satellites. Credit: SpaceX. A U.S. military data relay satellite and a rideshare platform with its own suite of payloads rocketed into a …

Space.com

An ambitious new survey of the Milky Way’s galactic plane has revealed 3.32 billion cosmic objects in stunning detail. The enormous celestial catalog, possibly the largest of its type, was built using data from …

Space.com

A SpaceX Dragon capsule is being modified on orbit to carry an extra astronaut home to Earth if need be. On Wednesday (Jan. 18), NASA plans to start moving agency astronaut Frank Rubio’s seat liner from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft over to Endurance, …

Space.com

Three ultra-faint dwarf galaxies have been discovered around a distant spiral galaxy with a mass similar to the Milky Way. The dwarf galaxies are believed to be around 12 billion years old, meaning their stars formed early in the universe’s history, under …

Space.com

SpaceX is set to launch a GPS satellite to orbit on Wednesday morning (Jan. 18), and you can watch the liftoff live. A Falcon 9 booster from SpaceX is scheduled to send GPS III Space Vehicle 06, an advanced Global Positioning System satellite, to space …

Space.com

The two planets are, of course, more than 800 million miles (nearly 130 million kilometers) apart on average, so there’s no chance of them literally colliding. But their orbits will make them seem like they might from the vantage point of skywatchers here …

Scientific American

Such galaxy mergers are happening all the time, all over the universe, and they are important building blocks for larger-scale cosmic structure. Astrophysicists have many questions about this extraordinary process, but one mystery has …

Space.com

When scientists analyzed fragments of the meteorite, they found that the asteroid it broke off from once had liquid water and that the meteorite itself contains organic compounds, including amino acids, some of which are the precursors to the proteins that …

Spaceflight Now

Watch our live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:24 a.m. EST (1224 GMT) on Jan. 18 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with the GPS 3 SV06 navigation satellite for the U.S. …

The Washington Post

That’s the finding from research that extracted multiple 100-foot or longer cores of ice from atop the world’s second-largest ice sheet. The samples allowed the researchers to construct a new temperature record based on the …