Published on: 2025-04-22 23:10:13
Satellite imagery collected for Google Earth has revealed some strange things in the past—from phantom islands to mysterious shipwrecks—but zooming in on a rural area in northern Texas recently showed a satellite in orbit and exhibiting a colorful apparition. Reddit users pointed out an image of a satellite flying over the Hagerman Wildlife Refuge near Gainesville, Texas, in the GoogleEarthFinds subreddit. We rarely get to see satellites in action, so this glimpse of the orbital flight is a rar
Keywords: earth image images orbit satellite
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-04-26 23:24:40
Dig deep on Google Earth and you'll inevitably find a surprise or two. Maybe you're looking at far-flung islands in the middle of an ocean or checking in on something closer to home. A few years ago, online sleuths found an image of a B-2 stealth bomber in flight over Missouri. The aircraft is smeared in the image because it was in motion, while the farm fields below appear as crisp as any other view on Google Earth. There's something else that now appears on Google Earth. Zoom in over rural N
Keywords: earth google orbit satellite starlink
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-04 07:15:54
An awkward-looking, spherical satellite the size of a grapefruit launched in March 1958, and was boosted into a high elliptical orbit. The satellite, named Vanguard-1, was a test of launch capabilities during the early days of the historic space age. Other satellites of its time have reentered through Earth’s atmosphere, burning up in a fiery death, but Vanguard-1 is still in orbit, silently zooming through the void of space. A team of researchers and engineers want to retrieve the satellite for
Keywords: earth orbit satellite space vanguard
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-08 19:10:54
Russia launched three secretive satellites into orbit earlier this year, and they appear to have recently released a mysterious object. The satellites’ unusual maneuvers have reignited concerns that Russia may be testing military capabilities in space—or even preparing for space warfare. The trio of satellites—designated Kosmos 2581, 2582, and 2583—launched on February 2 aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Russia hasn’t declared the purpose of the satellites, but the secretive launch raised suspicio
Keywords: orbit russia satellite satellites space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-15 01:57:05
A crypto billionaire and a filthy rich ketamine user have launched a trip to the stars — stop us if you've heard this one before. We promise it's not quite as Silicon Valley as it sounds, though as Australian explorer and freshman astronaut Eric Phillips told Ars Technica, there are shrooms involved. Alongside Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German roboticist Rabea Rogge, and Chinese crypto billionaire Chun Wang, Philips is a member of SpaceX's Fram2 mission. The first private flight o
Keywords: fram2 mission mushrooms orbit space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-19 19:23:10
Four adventurers suited up and embarked on a first-of-a-kind trip to space Monday night, becoming the first humans to fly in polar orbit aboard a SpaceX crew capsule chartered by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire. The private astronauts rocketed into orbit atop a Falcon 9 booster from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:46 pm EDT Monday (01:46 UTC Tuesday). Instead of heading to the northeast in pursuit of the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft depar
Keywords: chun mission orbit polar space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-22 15:45:41
Launching rockets from the ground is one thing, but deciding on a route to follow around Earth is a different story. Earth has a set of specific orbits, and space missions travel around the planet on an orbital road of their choice. But not all orbits are created equal—some are less traveled than others. SpaceX’s upcoming private mission will venture out to a polar orbit around Earth. Fram2, named in honor of the original ship that reached both Earth’s Arctic and Antarctic regions, is set for l
Keywords: earth orbit polar regions space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-22 22:00:08
Behold, the piping host particles of solar wind streaming from our Sun, caught in new footage from the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter. The video was captured by the orbiter’s Metis instrument, a coronagraph which blocks light directly from the Sun in order to see fainter phenomena in its outer atmosphere, or corona. New research describing the observations was published today in The Astrophysical Journal. “In this paper, we present observations by Metis during its perihelion passage of a striking heli
Keywords: metis orbiter solar sun wind
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-22 19:09:00
Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust TL;DR: The U.S. Space Force has tapped Seattle-based Gravitics to develop something akin to an aircraft carrier – but for spacecraft instead of jets. It's a $60 million contract signed off with the goal of protecting national assets up in space from potential threats in orbit. Reports suggest that countries like Russia and China are developing advanced counter-space capabilities. These include a mi
Keywords: carrier gravitics launch orbit space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-23 14:09:00
It's not every day that a prominent feature of our solar system disappears, but that's precisely what will happen with Saturn. Over the weekend, Saturn's gorgeous rings will nearly vanish from sight. No worries, they'll be back in a couple of weeks. This phenomenon is caused by an optical illusion that occurs when the stars line up. Saturn is tilted at 26.73 degrees on its orbit, while Earth is very close to that at a 23.5-degree tilt. When the two planets line up just right, the rings of Satur
Keywords: line orbit rings saturn schmoll
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-28 17:58:33
The Space Force Is Working on an Aircraft Carrier for Space "The vision is space superiority." Orbital Carrier Space startup Gravitics has been awarded a $60 million contract by the US Space Force to develop an "orbital carrier" that can deploy satellites from orbit. As Ars Technica reports, such a spacecraft could give the military a much faster way to respond to threats to national security in orbit compared to sending a satellite on a rocket into space. While many questions remain about
Keywords: carrier orbit orbital satellites space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-05-30 18:22:42
Mathieu Triay Principal Software Engineer Andrew Wood Designer Orbit is our pilot for a music discovery service that lets you find your next favourite song by exploring recently played tracks from BBC Introducing — the BBC’s platform for unsigned and undiscovered music. Every track is a crossroads where you have to decide with your ears: do you want to find out what you’re listening to, or do you want to try a related track? You can quickly move through the spectrum of musical genres, discover
Keywords: genres music orbit track tracks
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-13 14:01:25
Astronomers have spotted four smaller-than-Earth exoplanets orbiting the closest single-star system to us, called Barnard's Star. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, an international team of researchers discovered that the star — a small red dwarf star just 16 percent of our own Sun's mass and just under six light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus — has four tiny and seemingly rocky worlds orbiting it. According to the astronomer
Keywords: earth exoplanets orbiting planets star
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-22 18:29:00
TL;DR: The U.S. Space Force has successfully completed the seventh mission of the X-37B, an unmanned spaceplane that spent over 434 days in orbit. While its exact purpose remains classified, speculation continues about whether it serves as a surveillance tool, a rapid-response military asset, or something entirely different. Mission seven launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy on December 28, 2023, taking off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spaceplane was p
Keywords: 37b force orbit space spaceplane
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-24 09:47:00
Seven times now, an X-37B space plane has traveled to orbit and returned to Earth, each time spending months and months in space. The seventh mission ended March 7, 2025, when the uncrewed, reusable X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-7 landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It had been in orbit for 434 days, or more than 14 months, after leaving Earth's gravity aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in December 2023. The US Space Force doesn't reveal much about what the X-37B does on its cel
Keywords: 37b earth months orbit space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-25 23:20:54
The US military's robotic mini-space shuttle dropped out of orbit and glided to a runway in California late Thursday, ending a 434-day mission that pioneered new ways of maneuvering in space. The X-37B spaceplane touched down on Runway 12 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 11:22 pm local time Thursday (2:22 am EST Friday), capping its high-flying mission with an automated reentry and landing on the nearly three-mile-long runway at the West Coast's spaceport. The Space Force did not
Keywords: 37b force mission orbit space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-06-24 01:06:51
Next post Previous post A week or so ago, Scientific American republished this Martin Gardner puzzle from 1958: Two identical bolts are placed together so that their helical grooves intermesh (see illustration). If you move the bolts around each other as you would twiddle your thumbs, holding each bolt firmly by the head so that it does not rotate, will the heads move inward, move outward or remain the same distance from each other? The problem should, of course, be solved without resorting to
Keywords: bolt bolts don orbit threads
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-02 08:57:20
Since the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft launched in late February as a rideshare spacecraft along with a Falcon 9 launch, NASA has been providing a series of increasingly worrisome updates about the health of the small orbiter. Trailblazer appears to be spinning and out of contact with engineers back on Earth. In an update published on Tuesday evening, the space agency acknowledged that a mission operations team at the California Institute of Technology is continuing its efforts to reestablish c
Keywords: lunar moon orbit spacecraft trailblazer
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-12 20:30:11
Earth as seen in the first on-orbit photo released by the X-37B (left); the space plane prepares for its seventh mission, which launched on Dec. 28, 2023. The United States Space Force just offered a rare glimpse of its shadowy X-37B space plane in orbit. The photo, released on Thursday (Feb. 20), was taken by a camera onboard the X-37B while the secretive space plane orbited high above the African continent. One of the plane's solar panels is visible on the left side of the photo, while what
Keywords: 37b force orbit plane space
Find related items on AmazonPublished on: 2025-07-12 23:48:03
It’s not every day that we get to see a glimpse of what a mysterious space plane is up to in orbit. This week, the US Space Force shared a picture it says was snapped last year by the X-37B, showing Earth in the distance and a bit of the craft itself. X-37B launched on its seventh mission at the end of 2023, though not much is known about what that mission entails. Its previous flight, which wrapped up in 2022, set a new endurance record for the space plane, logging 908 days in orbit. There isn
Keywords: 37b force mission orbit space
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