Mars Insight will touch down on November 26. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
On November 26th, NASA’s Insight mission will land on Mars. That’s the plan anyway. Something like half of all Mars missions have failed, usually well before they approached the Red Planet, either because of launch failure or some error on its outward trip. While space agencies’ records have improved, especially over the last decade, Mars is littered with spacecraft that didn’t quite stick the landi ...read more
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A Successful Test Flight
Virgin Orbit, a spinoff of Virgin Galactic, flew its LauncherOne rocket for the first time ever this past Sunday, November 18. The company performed the test flight with the 21-meter rocket strapped to the wing of a modified Boeing 747-400 aircraft nicknamed Cosmic Girl.
The 80-minute-long captive-carry test flight took off from California’s Victorville Airport, northeast of Los Angeles.
“The vehicles flew like a dream today. Everyone ...read more
An artist’s interpretation of what Barnard’s star b, a super-Earth recently discovered just six light-years from Earth, may look like. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
Perhaps no other star system has elicited so much wonder, mystery and frustration as Barnard’s Star.
Astronomers announced last Wednesday they’d discovered a planet in its thrall weighing in at around three Earth-masses, with a frigid, 233-day orbit. The find finally answers whether we have any planetary ...read more
An image from the newly-created virtual reality simulation of a black hole.
Inside a Black Hole
Have you ever wanted to travel to the center of the galaxy and witness the power of a supermassive black hole in person? With current technology, humans couldn’t travel the 25,640 light-years from Earth to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole in a single lifetime. Nor could we survive being so close to the extreme gravitational forces of a singularity. But a new vi ...read more
This image shows mound fields. The mounds are found in dense, low, dry forest caatinga vegetation and can be seen when the land is cleared for pasture. (Credit: Roy Funch)
Two hundred million mounds of dirt dot an area about the size of Great Britain in a tropical forest in northeastern Brazil. The cone-shaped dirt piles are roughly twice as tall as the average American man and stretch 30 feet across at the base. The mounds, the work of countless generations of termites, rise from the earth ev ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
