Astronomy news

• China's record-breaking Gravity-1 rocket launches 9 satellites from a ship at sea (video)

  22-07-2026 23:00 via space.com
  
  The world's most powerful solid-fuel rocket just aced its third-ever mission.Gravity-1, a distinctively squat and stubby rocket, launched Tuesday night (July 21) from the deck of a ship stationed off the coast of Shanghai.Liftoff occurred at 10:54 p.m. EDT (0254 GMT and 10:54 a.m. Beijing time on July 22), according to the state-run Chinese outlet Xinhua, which further reported that all nine satellites reached "their designated orbits." Details about those satellites were not provided.Orienspace
  
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• NASA launched this spacecraft to save a satellite. Now, it needs saving too

  29-07-2026 20:00 via space.com
  
  Things aren't going so well for NASA's latest satellite rescue mission.NASA launched the Swift Boost mission on July 3, sending a specialized spacecraft to low Earth orbit on the final flight of Northrop Grumman's air-launched Pegasus XL rocket. The spacecraft is called LINK and was built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies. LINK was sent to orbit to try and link up with NASA's Swift observatory, a highly successful scientific satellite designed to search for gamma-ray bursts, some of t
  
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• SpaceX launching secret US spy satellite early on July 30: Watch it live

  29-07-2026 19:00 via space.com
  
  SpaceX plans to launch a secret reconnaissance mission for the U.S. government early on Thursday morning (July 30), and you can watch the action live.A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Thursday, kicking off a mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) called NROL-95.The 44-minute launch window opens at 2:37 a.m. EDT (0637 GMT). SpaceX has said it's targeting a time in the latter half of that span — 3:09 a.m. EDT (070
  
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• This genuinely pocket-sized smart telescope makes capturing the deep sky and the solar system almost effortless

  29-07-2026 18:35 via space.com
  
  The best smart telescopes have transformed astrophotography over the past few years, combining small telescope optics and automated mounts with dashcam-style camera sensors and image-processing software. The result? Compact devices that can be controlled entirely from a smartphone. Impressively, the DwarfLab Dwarf Mini pushes that concept even further.Roughly the size of a thick paperback book, it’s one of the smallest smart telescopes yet produced — tiny enough to fit in a jacket po
  
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• 'The Ark' creator Dean Devlin talks season 3's enormous mystery box and sci-fi surprises (interview)

  29-07-2026 17:00 via space.com
  
  SYFY’s optimistic space opera series, "The Ark," embarks upon its third thrilling season today, occupying a unique entertainment spot as the only weekly scripted sci-fi series currently on regular broadcast television. With an impressive creative resume featuring executive producers Dean Devlin ("Stargate," "Independence Day") and Jonathan Glassner ("Stargate SG-1") and a hopeful premise about humanity’s search for a new home amid the stars, it’s a refreshing show perfect for a
  
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• 'The Ark' creator Dean Devlin talks season 3’s enormous mystery box and sci-fi surprises (interview)

  29-07-2026 17:00 via space.com
  
  SYFY’s optimistic space opera series, "The Ark," embarks upon its third thrilling season today, occupying a unique entertainment spot as the only weekly scripted sci-fi series currently on regular broadcast television. With an impressive creative resume featuring executive producers Dean Devlin ("Stargate," "Independence Day") and Jonathan Glassner ("Stargate SG-1") and a hopeful premise about humanity’s search for a new home amid the stars, it’s a refreshing show perfect for a
  
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• The Holy Stone HS900 Pro drone is sadly middling and being outcompeted by many other models

  29-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  Key specsCamera: 48MP 1/2.3-inch CMOSVideo resolution: Up to 4KFrame rates: 4K 30 FPS / FHD up to 60 FPSBattery: 2250 mAh up to 30 minutes flightCharger type: USB-C cableVideo transmission range: 6.2 milesDimensions: : Folded 5.63 x 3.26 x 2.44 in / 143 x 82.8 x 62 mm / Unfolded 6.59 x 8.57x2.44 in / 167.4 x 217.8 x 62 mmWeight: 8.78 oz/ 249 gThe sub-250 g drone market shows no signs of reducing competition, with manufacturers racing to offer advanced features at increasingly affordable prices.
  
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• SpaceX Starship still floating 5 days after flight | Space photo of the day for July 29, 2026

  29-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  SpaceX's Starship Version 3 floats on the Indian Ocean on July 28, 2026, days after splashing down on the vehicle's Flight Test 13 on July 24. (Image credit: SpaceX via X)SpaceX's Starship V3 looks absolutely seaworthy in this new photo taken days after its most recent flight test.What is it?SpaceX launched its Starship vehicle on July 24, sending the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) Starship Version 3 (V3) rocket on a suborbital trajectory that saw the rocket's upper stage make its softest splashdown
  
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• On this day in space! July 29, 1982: Soviet Salyut 6 space station falls to Earth

  29-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  On July 29, 1982, the Salyut 6 space station fell out of space and safely burned up in Earth's atmosphere along the way.Salyut 6 was the eighth space station the Soviet Union had built for its Salyut program. It spent almost five years in orbit and supported five different crewed cosmonaut missions. While aboard Salyut 6, those cosmonauts made astronomical observations and studied the effects of spaceflight on the human body.Though the aging space station was still considered fully functional in
  
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• X-ray spacecraft detects the 36-million-degree 'breath' of an ancient black hole

  29-07-2026 15:00 via space.com
  
  Using NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope, astronomers have spotted the blisteringly hot exhaust fumes of one the earliest quasars, cosmic "breath" with temperatures as great as 36 million degrees Fahrenheit. This intensely bright titan is powered by a feeding supermassive black hole engine.The Chandra X-ray telescope observed a relatively silent quasar that existed 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang. The cosmic "exhaust fumes" from this black hole engines extend out for around 100,000 light-
  
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• July's full Buck Moon leads a mini planet parade through the summer sky tonight

  29-07-2026 12:27 via space.com
  
  The July full "Buck Moon" rises tonight to lead Saturn, Mars and Mercury in a spectacular mini planetary parade through the summer sky. Here's what you need to know.July's full moon phase occurs at 10:36 a.m. EDT on July 29 (1436 GMT), when the lunar disk will appear fully illuminated. It's often called the Buck Moon, to reflect the time when young male deer grow out their antlers. It has also been named the Berry Moon by the indigenous Anishinaabe people and as the Thunder Moon by the Western A
  
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• DJI Lito 1 drone review

  29-07-2026 00:00 via space.com
  
  Key specsCamera: 48MP 1/2-inch CMOSVideo resolution: Up to 4KFrame rates: 4K 100 FPS / 2.7K vertical up to 60 FPS / FHD up to 100 FPSBattery: 2590 mAh up to 36 minutes flightCharger type: USB-C cable/battery charging hubModes: Cine, Normal, SportVideo transmission range: 9.3 miles (IC) / 4.97 miles (CE/SRRC/MIC)Dimensions: : Folded 5.67 x 3.70 x 2.44 in / 144 x 94 x 62 mm / Unfolded 7.20 x 9.88 x 3.11 in / 183 x 251 x 79 mmWeight: 8.78 oz/ 249 gThe drone market is hotter than ever, with newbie a
  
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• NASA fuels its next-gen Roman Space Telescope for August launch

  28-07-2026 23:00 via space.com
  
  NASA announced on Tuesday (July 28) that it has officially fueled-up the Roman Space Telescope — a magnificent new observatory expected to generate over 500 terabytes of cosmic data per year. By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope, in its 35 years of service, has created over 400 terabytes in total.At present, the Roman Space Telescope's launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to occur on Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). And considering the project is sort of the gol
  
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• Our Milky Way galaxy appears to have flipped 90 degrees long ago. But why?

  28-07-2026 21:00 via space.com
  
  The Milky Way's spiral disk may have flipped over by 90 degrees, in turn altering the solar system's orbit around the center of the galaxy.Spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way have two main, visible, structural components: a disk that encapsulates most of its stars, gas and the central black hole, and a more diffuse halo of older stars that encapsulates the disk.However, the Milky Way's stellar halo has always been a bit of an oddity. The European Space Agency's Gaia mission measured the motion
  
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• 'Silo' season 3's Ashley Zuckerman and Jessica Henwick share the secret to their on-screen chemistry (interview)

  28-07-2026 19:00 via space.com
  
  In Apple TV’s "Silo" season 3, we lunge back 352 years to the Before Times to see how the greatest engineering project in the history of the world began… and would end. Center stage in this dark sci-fi drama are ambitious Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick), the pre-apocalypse duo we were first introduced to in Season 2's final episode.In that scene, the handsome couple met on a first date in a Washington, D.C. restaurant in the aft
  
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• SpaceX launches 24 Starlink satellites to orbit in wake of Starship test flight (video)

  28-07-2026 17:00 via space.com
  
  SpaceX launched 24 more satellites for its Starlink network on Saturday (July 25), a day after demonstrating it could do the same on its next-gen rocket.A Falcon 9 rocket carrying Starlink group 17-51 lifted off at 11:51 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT or 8:51 a.m. PDT local time) on Saturday from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. About an hour later, the 24 broadband internet satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO), as planned.Previous Booster B1100 launch
  
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• On this day in space! July 28, 1851: The 1st photo of a total solar eclipse was taken by a Prussian daguerreotypist

  28-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  On July 28, 1851, the first-ever photo of a total solar eclipse was recorded by a Prussian daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. Daguerreotypy is an old photographic process that uses silver-plated copper treated with chemical fumes that make it light-sensitive. Previous attempts to take photos of solar eclipses failed to show the contrast between the sun's corona and the dark disk of the moon. Using a small, 6-centimeter telescope, Berkowski captured an 84-second exposure sta
  
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• On this day in space! July 28, 1851: The 1st photo of a total solar eclipse was taken by a Prussian daguerreotypist

  28-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  On July 28, 1851, the first-ever photo of a total solar eclipse was recorded by a Prussian daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. Daguerreotypy is an old photographic process that uses silver-plated copper treated with chemical fumes that make it light-sensitive. Previous attempts to take photos of solar eclipses failed to show the contrast between the sun's corona and the dark disk of the moon. Using a small, 6-centimeter telescope, Berkowski captured an 84-second exposure sta
  
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• ISS meets Venus in incredible daylight photo | Space photo of the day for July 28, 2026

  28-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  Venus beside the International Space Station as captured by photographer A.J. Smadi from Edmonds, Washington on July 18, 2026. (Image credit: AJ Smadi)An astrophotographer captured a breathtaking scene as the International Space Station zoomed by Venus in the daytime sky.A post shared by AJ Smadi (@aj.smadi)A photo posted byon What is it?Photographer AJ Smadi set up the scene on July 18 in a park near Seattle, Washington. Smadi used a 9.25" (23.5 cm) Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope and a
  
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• BALLS on the moon: China set to launch Africa's 1st lunar science mission in 2029

  28-07-2026 15:00 via space.com
  
  China's Chang'e-8 moon lander mission scheduled for 2029 could send Africa's first space exploration mission to the lunar south pole.Under the Africa2Moon venture, the Bounced African Low Lunar Sphere, or BALLS for short, is a technology demonstrator in which a trio of spherical probes on the lunar surface will form a radio astronomy array at the moon's south pole region. Each of the metal spheres contains low-frequency radio telescope antennas that will search for signals from some of the oldes
  
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• Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! Astronomers capture clearest image yet of famous star's elusive companion

  28-07-2026 14:00 via space.com
  
  Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile to discover the strongest evidence yet that the famous star Betelgeuse has a companion star. That means after a century of investigation, scientists are closer than ever before to conclusively identifying Betelgeuse as a binary system composed of two stars, Betelgeuse A and Betelgeuse B. Betelgeuse is a red colored star visible with the naked eye in the constellation of Orion and located around 65
  
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• 'Crazy idea' succeeds: Scientists monitor space junk with radio telescopes

  28-07-2026 12:00 via space.com
  
  Radio telescopes are designed to listen for signals from the stars and from distant galaxies, but scientists are also pointing out that these instruments can also track objects somewhat closer to home: junk in Earth's orbit.Engineers have used the famed radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in the U.K. as part of an international plan to watch high-altitude space debris. Normally, old satellites and bits of spacecraft stuck up in geostationary orbit are too high up for our normal ways of watching spac
  
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• The unique DJI Lito X1 drone is packed full of functionality and you can't buy it in the USA

  28-07-2026 11:00 via space.com
  
  Key specsCamera: 48MP 1/1.3-inch CMOSVideo resolution: Up to 4KFrame rates: 4K 100 FPS / 2.7K vertical up to 60 FPS / FHD up to 200 FPSBattery: 2788 mAh up to 36 minutes flightCharger type: USB-C cable/battery charging hubModes: Cine, Normal, SportVideo transmission range: 9.3 miles (IC) / 4.97 miles (CE/SRRC/MIC)Dimensions: : Folded 5.67 x 3.70 x 2.44 in / 144 x 94 x 62 mm / Unfolded 7.20 x 9.88 x 3.11 in / 183 x 251 x 79 mmWeight: 8.78 oz/ 249 gDrones are more accessible than ever before, and
  
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• Starship in space! See highlights of SpaceX megarocket's epic Flight 13 test launch (video)

  28-07-2026 00:00 via space.com
  
  The 13th test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket went pretty well — and provided some amazing visuals, too.Flight 13 launched on Friday (July 24), sending the 408-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship Version 3 (V3) vehicle aloft from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.Starship's Super Heavy booster had some engine issues on its way back to Earth. But the Ship upper stage hit all of its marks, successfully deploying 20 next-gen Starlink satellites, re-igniting one of its Raptor engines in
  
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• Rocket Lab to start launching missile-defense missions from Alaska under $266 million Space Force deal

  27-07-2026 22:00 via space.com
  
  Rocket Lab is expanding its launch operations to the snowy north.The California-based company, which already flies from New Zealand and Virginia, just inked a $266 million deal with the U.S. Space Force to fly up to 18 missile-defense missions, most of them from Alaska."The size and scale of this contract reflects the Space Force's confidence in our ability to meet their urgent national security demands with speed, responsiveness and scale, and we're proud to provide the high-frequency launch ca
  
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• 25 years on, 2001's 'Planet of the Apes' has become a bit of a guilty pleasure

  27-07-2026 20:00 via space.com
  
  We didn't exactly go bananas for Tim Burton's odd take on "Planet of the Apes" back in 2001, but now, on the occasion of the sci-fi film’s 25th anniversary, we've had time to reflect on not only the summertime spectacle's notable missteps, but also its unsung merits.Invading the hallowed grounds of director Franklin Schaffner’s 1968 original "Planet of the Apes" was risky business at best, but 20th Century Fox rolled the dice with their long-gestating $100 million remake and a compet
  
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• On this day in space! July 27, 1962: The 1st zero-g cosmonaut training flight took off on a Soviet jetliner

  27-07-2026 19:20 via space.com
  
  On July 27, 1962, two Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soviet airliner and experienced weightlessness without going to space. This was the first time cosmonauts completed zero-G training on an airplane. The Tupolev Tu-104 was a type of jetliner originally designed to transport 50 passengers. It was modified to accommodate cosmonauts who needed to train in an environment that simulated weightlessness. By flying in a parabolic arc, passengers could experience 6 to 25 seconds of weightlessness on each
  
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• On this day in space! July 27, 1962: The 1st zero-g cosmonaut training flight takes off on a Soviet jetliner

  27-07-2026 19:20 via space.com
  
  On July 27, 1962, two Russian cosmonauts boarded a Soviet airliner and experienced weightlessness without going to space. This was the first time cosmonauts completed zero-G training on an airplane. The Tupolev Tu-104 was a type of jetliner originally designed to transport 50 passengers. It was modified to accommodate cosmonauts who needed to train in an environment that simulated weightlessness. By flying in a parabolic arc, passengers could experience 6 to 25 seconds of weightlessness on each
  
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• Are we overlooking signs of alien life that aren't technological or biological? 'Bread would be a signature of intelligence'

  27-07-2026 18:00 via space.com
  
  The search for alien life has tended to focus on looking for either signs of extraterrestrial technology or evidence of biological processes on other worlds. But new and ongoing research suggests that scientists should start considering signs of intelligence that are not necessarily technological, but which are sufficiently complex as to be evidence of a conscious mind at work. Biosignatures are possible signs of biology on other planets, whereas technosignatures are clues to the presence of adv
  
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• We've found huge discounts on a range of ZWO astronomy cameras, including three we love

  27-07-2026 16:25 via space.com
  
  ZWO is well known for its Seestar smart telescopes but they also make dedicated astronomy cameras for use with telescopes to get highly detailed astrophotography. We have reviewed three of these ZWO astrocams and they have delivered beautiful images of the different objects. The color cameras like the ZWO ASI183MC Pro and ZWO ASI533MC Pro have delivered beautiful colored detail in galaxies and nebulas, whereas the monochrome ZWO ASI175 mono delivered exceptional solar photography.Explore the ZWO
  
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