CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A private **** ecraft that was supposed to provide a lifeline to NASA's Swift Observatory managed to get close to the sinking telescope and even snap photos two weeks after the rescue was abandoned.
But the three-armed robotic salvager had to turn away because it was low on fuel, according to Katalyst **** e Technologies, which attempted the daring operation.
"We got so close, but so far," Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee told The **** ociated Press this week.
Katalyst's Link **** ecraft got within 15 kilometers (9 miles) of Swift on Tuesday, using its sensors to gather data on the doomed telescope for NASA. The rescue effort had already been called off in August because of Link's own troubles in orbit, but the company wanted the practice for future satellite-servicing missions.
Link went into an uncontrollable spin soon after rocketing to Swift's rescue in July. Flight controllers managed to slow the tumble and stabilize the **** ecraft, using up precious fuel. In the end, there was not enough fuel remaining to boost the aging Swift into a higher, longer-lasting orbit so it could continue observing the cosmos.

#rescue #link #close #telescope

It was another busy weekend for ******* eX
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#launching

By Will Dunham
Sept 1 (Reuters) - Scientists have made a possible breakthrough in the hunt for dark matter — observing hints of it during an experiment about a mile (1.6 km) underground in South Dakota — though they stopped short of saying they have finally detected this elusive cosmic component.
The researchers described a particle interaction ‌documented at the Sanford Underground Research Facility — built in a former gold mine in the state's Black Hills region — that may have involved a hypothesized particle called a ‌WIMP, short for "weakly interacting massive particle." This is one of the proposed candidates for being a dark matter particle.
Ordinary matter makes up stars, planets, people and everything else we can see. But it represents only about 15% of all the matter in the universe. The rest is thought to be dark matter, which does not emit or reflect light, making it invisible to the human eye and to telescopes. But scientists are confident dark matter exists because of its gravitational effects at galactic scales.
Particle physicist Sam Eriksen of the University of Bristol in England, lead author of a study describing the work, said it "could be the first hint of a dark matter observation."

#matter #sept

A ******* eX rocket carrying NASA's new Nancy Grace Roman ******* e Telescope blasted off the launch pad at Kennedy ******* e Center on Sunday morning. The new state-of-the-art telescope is more powerful than the Hubble and James Webb telescopes and is expected to revolutionize what we know about the universe.

#SpaceX #nancy #grace #center

A massive observatory that scientists have called a "discovery machine" is set to launch toward the cosmos, beginning a journey that could mark a significant shift in our understanding of the universe.
Designed to seek out otherwise invisible and faint ***** e objects, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman ***** e Telescope is expected to lift off aboard a ***** eX Falcon Heavy rocket as soon as 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday from Kennedy ***** e Center in Florida.
Over the next five years, the bus-size telescope's observations could reveal answers to enduring mysteries such as dark energy, which fuels the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe, and dark matter, which provides the cosmos with structure but remains unseen. It could allow astronomers to spot previously unseen galaxies and exoplanets, worlds around stars beyond our solar system, as well rogue planets that don't orbit stars at all.
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#space #universe #stars #nancy

NASA is preparing for the weekend launch of the most advanced deep ****** e telescope ever that will allow us to see thousands of planets, millions of galaxies and billions of stars. It's designed to help us learn more about the universe and whether humans are alone. NBC's Tom Costello reports for TODAY.

#preparing #advanced #deep

By Will Dunham
Aug 25 (Reuters) - NASA is preparing to launch its next flagship ****** e observatory, one that scientists plan to use to investigate some of the universe's biggest mysteries including dark energy and dark matter, while also testing gravity at vast scales and hunting for planets beyond our solar system.
The launch of the Nancy ‌Grace Roman ****** e Telescope, a roughly $4 billion project, is planned for Sunday at NASA's Kennedy ****** e Center in Florida, with the observatory to be lofted into orbit aboard a ‌SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The launch comes nine months ahead of schedule, according to U.S. ****** e agency officials.
Roman is a follow-on to the Hubble ****** e Telescope, launched in 1990, and the James Webb ****** e Telescope, launched in 2021, and has capabilities that can expand on the knowledge gained by those pioneering observatories, both of which continue to operate.
The new telescope's panoramic view of ****** e and its rapid survey speeds offer the opportunity for scientists to study the cosmos as never before, with wide-field surveys examining its structure, composition and evolution.

#space #observatory #launched #dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New observations of some of Neptune's moons and rings are providing evidence of a catastrophe that occurred billions of years ago around the solar system's outermost planet in which a Pluto-sized interloper caused a celestial demolition derby.
Researchers used NASA's James Webb ***** e Telescope to examine the composition of three of Neptune's small inner moons — Proteus, Larissa and Galatea — and its inner dusty rings, and detected clay minerals that one might expect to find deep inside certain worlds in the outer reaches of the solar system. These magnesium-rich minerals are known to exist on the dwarf planet Ceres, which orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and in some meteorites.
"These minerals require prolonged contact between liquid water and rock to form," said planetary scientist Ryleigh Davis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.
"The moons themselves are far too small and cold for that chemistry to have occurred in place, so the clay had to come from somewhere else — the deep interior of a much larger ancient world. Finding this material on Neptune's inner moons points to a catastrophic event in Neptune's past that destroyed those ancient worlds and exposed their deep interiors, with the small moons and rings we see today re-forming from that wreckage," said Davis, who worked on the study while at Caltech.
First possible exomoon may change definition of what a moon is

#moons #rings #deep #planet

NASA is preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope next month on a ******* eX rocket. It's named after the "mother" of the Hubble telescope, but will produce an image so large, it will allow NASA to see parts of the universe we've never seen before. NBC News' Tom Costello got to look at the new telescope up close.

#telescope #grace

'When he plays like that, it’s tough to beat us.': Christian Pulisic's blazing start has USMNT believing originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Equipped with a telescope or perhaps one of those drones U.S. Soccer was flying overhead, one might have been able to get a decent look at Christian Pulisic this week as he trained individually in advance of Friday’s second game at the 2026 World Cup.
A kick in the calf during his brilliant first-half performance against Paraguay in the opening game last week led him to exit at halftime, and it has impacted his work in preparation for the second Group D game, against Australia. As witnessed by reporters at Great Park in Irvine, Calif., Monday, the United States men’s national team’s practice amounted to: They’re over here, he’s way over there.
This was true a third consecutive day Wednesday. It is not a small matter, but his teammates insist it’s not a big deal. Some of them have been around Pulisic more than a decade, from youth national teams to multiple World Cups. They understand why people care, but they’ve known him too well for too long to expect him to be absent from such a big game.
Could the USMNT get by without him for a night? Well, getting by is not the idea. What they want is to continue the standard from the 4-1 victory over Paraguay into subsequent games against Australia and Turkey, and that requires more of what we saw from Pulisic in those first 45 minutes.

What is the blue-white star next to the moon tonight?

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Look to the southern sky at sunset on May 26 to see the waxing gibbous moon shining close to the sparkling blue-white light of the bright star Spica in the constellation Virgo, ahead of this week's rare "Blue Moon".
The 83%-lit moon will sit a little under 40 degrees above the southern horizon — roughly the width of four clenched fists stacked at arm's length — with Spica close to its left.
Spica's light represents not one, but two colossal stars, which orbit each other once every four days. Together, they shine with a combined luminosity of more than 12,000 suns, according to the astronomy website EarthSky.
Turn a pair of binoculars or a small telescope on the moon to see an arc of light shining close to the line separating night from day on the lunar surface, created as sunlight glances off the peaks of the Montes Jura mountain range on the northwestern edge of Mare Imbrium.

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Dying star resembles a billowing crystal ball in new telescope photo

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A dying star has never looked so lovely.
The Gemini North Telescope atop Hawaii’s tallest peak, Mauna Kea, captured the star in its last gasps. The image was released Thursday by the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, which operates the telescope.
It’s actually a binary star system 1,500 light-years away, nicknamed the Crystal Ball Nebula because of the milky white, spherical cloud around it. A light-year is almost 6 trillion miles.
This cloud of gas forms when a star sheds its outer layers near the end of its life. The exposed stellar core heats the cloud to tens of thousands of degrees, giving it an ethereal glow.
Scientists believe one of the planetary nebula’s two orbiting stars — once bigger than our sun — gave up the ghost.

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Did decaying dark matter help create the universe's first supermassive black holes?

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New research suggests that supermassive black holes that existed before the cosmos was 1 billion years old may have formed with a helping hand from dark matter, the universe's most mysterious stuff.
Ever since the James Webb **** e Telescope (JWST) first began reporting data back to Earth in the summer of 2022, it has been delivering a curious problem into the laps of scientists, finding supermassive blac

Jupiter's moons leave cold 'footprints' in the planet's auroras, James Webb ****** e Telescope finds

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Jupiter's moons can have surprising effects on the world's displays of auroral lights by "stomping down" on the planet's gigantic magnetic environment.These surprising effects, detected in observations from the James Webb ****** e Telescope (JWST), include a cold spot in Jupiter's atmosphere, and a rapid increase in the density of charged particles."The moons constantly interact with the m

Once deemed the riskiest asteroid ever observed, asteroid 2024 YR4’s path is now clearer

The possibility that a huge ******* e rock — once deemed the riskiest asteroid ever observed — could hit the moon now appears to be off the table.
Discovered at the end of December 2024, asteroid 2024 YR4 at first seemed a serious threat to Earth, with scientists estimating as much as a 3.1% chance of it impacting our planet on December 22, 2032. A series of observations from ground- and ******* e-based telescopes quickly helped rule that out, but by June 2025, a new concern emerged: a 4.3% chance YR4

NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory is considered one of the agency’s greatest achievements, but it’s not necessarily as recognizable as siblings like the James Webb and Hubble ****** e Telescopes. However, since 1999, the powerful ****** ecraft has peered deep into the cosmos to provide astronomers with never-before-seen glimpses of the Milky Way galaxy. As the observatory nears its 27th anniversary, NASA is highlighting its Chandra Source Catalog (CSC), an absolutely massive archive of visualization data collected over the years.
The most recent CSC update adds more than 400,000 unique compact

Want to see what **** e really looks like? Scientists just released a stunning new cosmic map

NASA has released a stunning new map of the cosmos, one that the agency says could help scientists solve some of the universe’s longstanding mysteries.
Taken using the agency’s SPHEREx **** e telescope, the first all-sky map simulates the instrument’s three-dimensional view of the sky, including the burnt red cosmic dust, electric blue hydrogen gas and white, blue and green stars.
The panoramic view captures these and dozens of other colors using the telescope’s ability to see infrared wavelength

The universe is enormous. By the time you finish reading this sentence, it will be even more enormous.
That’s because the universe is expanding—but not everything is expanding at the same rate. The farther away things are, the faster they’re moving away from us. For every megaparsec (around 3.3 million light-years) of distance from our vantage point, this rate of expansion increases by around 45 miles per second. This rate is known as “Hubble’s Constant,” named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble of ******* e telescope fame, who discovered it in 1929.
Now, astronomers from the University of To

The ***** e around Earth is aswarm with satellites. Recently, the dangers of overcrowding the area lower than 1,200 miles overhead—so-called low Earth orbit (LEO)—have emerged. For example, collisions threaten to destroy valuable tech and sometimes rain ***** e junk down on our planet.
Scientists have started sounding another alarm regarding the throng of satellites that encircles us: They’re now messing up astronomical images taken by ground and by ***** e telescopes designed to image the deep cosmos.
According to NASA researchers, if humanity continues to launch orbital satellites into low

James Webb ******* e Telescope captures view of 2 dwarf galaxies midcollision

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A spectacular new view of two dwarf galaxies caught in the middle of a cosmic collision reveals a glowing gas bridge, streams of newborn stars and the ongoing gravitational tug-of-war reshaping both galaxies.
Taken by the James Webb ******* e Telescope (JWST), the new image captures the dwarf galaxies NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 stretching, tugging and warping one another in a dramatic gravitational dance unfolding 2

NASA warns satellite boom could ruin 96% of telescope images

A new NASA-led study shows that the increasing number of satellites in low-Earth orbit could ruin up to 96% of images from some orbiting telescopes and **** e observatories.
“The urgency starts in the moment we’re seeing a very rapid increase in the number of satellite constellations, in particular, not the satellites that have been launched, but in the satellites that are being proposed,” Dr. Alejandro Serrano Borlaff, research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and co-author of the study, told ABC News. “Before these satell

To commemorate 25 years since the International Gemini Observatory achieved full operations, Chilean students selected the stunning ***** erfly Nebula (NGC 6302) as the celebratory image for the Gemini South telescope in Chile.
Operated by NSF’s NOIRLab and located atop Cerro Pachón, the 8.1-meter Gemini South telescope captured a breathtaking new image of the glowing, wing-shaped planetary nebula as part of the “Gemini First Light Anniversary Image Contest.”
The contest invited students from the observatory’s host communities in Chile and Hawaii to choose an object that honors the observato

We learn more and more about our universe all the time, but there’s recently been a huge spike in stunning cosmic observations. An increase in funding, dramatic advancements in telescopes, AI, image-processing algorithms, and data ******* ysis has unleashed a flood of great new discoveries in 2025.
As fact-finders, it’s nice to know that a universe as big as ours keeps the new facts rolling in. We know the multiverse is just theory as of now, but if we ever prove there are other universes out there, we’ll try to gobble up facts about those, too. It’s never enough for us! Hopefully this pace o

Scientists may have finally 'seen' dark matter for the 1st time

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Scientists may have "seen" dark matter for the first time, thanks to NASA's Fermi gamma-ray **** e telescope. If so, this would mark the first direct detection of the universe's most mysterious substance.
Dark matter was theorized in 1933 by astronomer Fritz Zwicky, who found that the visible galaxies of the Coma Cluster lacked the necessary gravitational influence to prevent this cluster from flying apart. Then, in the 1970

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A telescope in Chile has captured a stunning new picture of a grand and graceful cosmic ******* erfly.
The National Science Foundation’s NoirLab released the picture Wednesday.
Snapped last month by the Gemini South telescope, the aptly named ******* erfly Nebula is 2,500 to 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. A single light-year is 6 trillion miles.
At the heart of this bipolar nebula is a white dwarf star that cast aside its outer layers of gas long ago. The discarded gas forms the ******* erflylike wings billowing from the aging star, whose h

It’s billions of years in the future, but at some point, our warm, friendly sun exhausts its fuel and eventually collapses into a white dwarf. It’s a common fate for stars that aren’t massive enough to become black holes or neutron stars. Using an X-Ray telescope orbiting the Earth, researchers were able to take a peek into the heart of a unique “vampire” white dwarf system (EX Hydrae) for the first time, publishing their findings recently in the The Astrophysical Journal.
White dwarfs are incredibly dense—they have the mass of the sun collapsed into a ****** e about the size of Earth—and the

Saturn’s rings disappear tonight in rare cosmic event

Tonight, Saturn is about to pull off a cosmic trick that even seasoned skywatchers rarely get to witness—its famous rings will seemingly vanish, leaving the gas giant looking strangely bare in the night sky. It’s not magic, and it’s not a glitch in your telescope, but the reason behind this startling disappearance is far more fascinating than you might expect. Keep reading to find out what’s really happening and why this illusion won’t return for years.
On the night of November 23, anyone peering at Saturn through a telescope may think

A team of astronomers has discovered a supermassive black hole that is 100 million times the mass of the sun. This impressive discovery was found using the powerful James Webb ****** e Telescope's (JWST) infrared eye. The research team believes this black hole existed during cosmic noon, a term used to refer to the time period 4 billion years after the Big Bang — of which there is now a new model to try to explain the origins of the universe.
The JWST has helped to discover what are referred to as little red dots. They are points of light from the early cosmos that aren't fully understood. Gi

A comet that is likely much, much older than our solar system has spent months traipsing through Earth's cosmic neighborhood. And at long last, NASA has unveiled an unprecedented look at the object, named 3I/ATLAS.
And no, it's not an alien ****** eship.
A trove of photos the U.S. ****** e agency dropped reveal fascinating new characteristics of 3I/ATLAS, which has captured the public's attention since it was first spotted at the beginning of July by a ground telescope in Chile. The visitor, which is on an unusual trajectory taking it momentarily through our solar system, has made waves as j

NASA is getting ready for a 3I/ATLAS photo dump.
The U.S. ***** e agency has announced plans to release additional images of the famed interstellar comet that was first spotted in July trespassing in Earth's solar system. The impending reveal would mark the first time NASA has unveiled high-resolution images of 3I/ATLAS since its fleet of ***** e telescopes began observing the comet more than three months ago.
The Hubble ***** e Telescope, for instance, snapped a high-res image of the comet at the end of July that NASA billed as "the sharpest-ever picture" of 3I/ATLAS. Because it's incredib