Don’t get spooked by Saturn’s ghostly spokes! Today we feature a nearly two-hour timelapse of Saturn and its rings looping forwards and backwards. A day on Saturn is only 10 hours long, so two hours of observation covers quite a bit of its rotation. If you look closely, a ghoulish shadow appears and disappears as Saturn’s B ring rotates. Decades of observation with Voyager 2, Cassini, and Hubble show the appearance of Saturn’s spokes varies with the planet’s seasons. Like Earth, Saturn’s spin axis is tilted compared to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. During Saturn’s equinox, the rings are less tilted away from the Sun and the planet receives more evenly distributed sunlight and solar wind. Although their origin is still uncertain, Saturn’s spokes may be shadows of and reflections off of dust and ice levitating above the rings caused by electromagnetic interactions between the solar wind and the planet’s magnetic field. Find dark skies and look up this August to witness the Perseid meteor shower uninhibited by the Moon!
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HELSINKI — China sent a new pair of secretive satellites into a programmatically new orbit Wednesday, while also upgrading its on-orbit communications relay capabilities. A Long March 6A rocket lifted […] The post China launches secretive TJS-27 pair, orbits next-gen Tianlian relay sat appeared first on SpaceNews.
Converting an engineering model of a Mars rover into an actual lunar rover could cost NASA more than $1 billion, an estimate strongly rejected by the agency’s administrator. The post Sending repurposed Mars rover to the moon could cost more than $1 billion appeared first on SpaceNews.
WARSAW, Poland — The Spanish government announced it will allocate between 1.6 billion and 2 billion euros ($1.8 to $2.3 billion) to develop a national military satellite communications constellation that […] The post Spain commits up to $2.3 billion for national military communications for IRIS² appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Space Force Association’s National Spacepower Center is building an unclassified environment for demonstrating threats to satellites and their consequences on Earth The post Inside the effort to show Congress what war in space looks like appeared first on SpaceNews.
Vendors will compete for orders to build satellites, sensors and systems for more realistic military space exercises The post Space Force picks 15 companies for $981 million training range contract appeared first on SpaceNews.
A NASA official says that work with Boeing on the company’s CST-100 Starliner vehicle is making “good progress” but declined to offer a date when the spacecraft could fly again. The post NASA still assessing Starliner-1 flight opportunities appeared first on SpaceNews.
