compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

How NJ played a role in the Perseverance rover mission
This week, we got to witness history in space exploration as the Perseverance rover safely landed on the surface of Mars. The rovers main mission is to search for signs that life once existed on the red planet. Being the most sophisticated rover to ever land on Mars, it took many years and a team of dedicated...more

Seven Hundred Leagues Beneath Titan’s Methane Seas What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn’s large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs…more

A Famous Black Hole Gets a Massive Update One of the biggest and first known black holes in the Milky Way galaxy is more massive than astronomers thought, a team of scientists announced on Thursday. The finding throws a wrench into long-held models of how massive stars evolve on the way to the ultimate doom...more

CaSSIS mission: The camera capturing Mars’ craters and canyons This month the Red Planet entered its new year, what is known as Year 36, and it has not long been overtaken by Earth in its orbit of the Sun. The distance between Earth and Mars constantly changes because of their different speeds around the Sun, therefore the optimum launch window for missions is just once every 26 months…more

Earth to Voyager 2: After a Year in the Darkness, We Can Talk to You Again In the nearly 44 years since NASA launched Voyager 2, the spacecraft has gone beyond the frontiers of human exploration by visiting Uranus, Neptune and, eventually, interstellar space. Last March, the agency was compelled to shut down its only means of reaching 12 billion miles across the heavens…more

Life on Venus? The Picture Gets Cloudier A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus. If true, that would be stunning. People have long gazed into the cosmos and wondered whether something is alive out there…more

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captures stunning Venus photo during close flyby NASA’s Parker Solar Probe nailed its fourth swing past Venus on Feb. 20, and mission scientists celebrated by releasing a stunning image captured during a similar maneuver in July. Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018 with a daring mission…more

Company plans to start building private Voyager space station Voyager Station will be able to accommodate 400 guests, its builders say. Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC) recently unveiled new details about its ambitious Voyager Station, which is projected to be the first commercial space station operating with artificial gravity…more

 Astrophysicists create the most accurate ‘flat map’ of Earth ever Earth is a sphere, so how can it be accurately portrayed on a 2D map? Simply flatten Earth into two pancakes, one depicting the Northern Hemisphere and the other the Southern, with the equator running around the edge, a new study finds. This double-sided pancake map is the most accurate flat map of Earth ever created. (Image credit: J. Richard Gott, Robert Vanderbei and David Goldberg)..more