compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

James Webb: Hubble telescope successor faces ‘two weeks of terror’
Engineers like to describe the process of landing a rover on Mars as the “seven minutes of terror”. But when it comes to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), it’s more like “two weeks of terror”. The successor observatory to the mighty Hubble telescope has been built to…more

A New 10-Year Plan for the Cosmos On astronomers’ wish list for the next decade: two giant telescopes and a space telescope to search for life and habitable worlds beyond Earth. American astronomers on Thursday called for the nation to invest in a new generation of “extremely large” multibillion-dollar telescopes that would be bigger than any now on Earth or orbiting in space…more

Star System With Right-Angled Planets Surprises Astronomers Star systems come in all shapes and sizes. Some have lots of planets, some have larger planets and others have no planets at all. But a particularly unusual system about 150 light-years from our own has scientists scratching their heads. In 2016, astronomers discovered two planets orbiting the star HD 3167….more

Nasa’s Moon return pushed back to 2025 The first Nasa mission since 1972 to put humans on the Moon’s surface has been pushed back by one year to 2025. Few observers expected Nasa to make the previous 2024 date, because of a funding shortfall and a lawsuit over the landing vehicle. But the space agency’s chief Bill Nelson confirmed the delay in a press conference on Tuesday…more

A Missing Piece of the Moon May Be Following Earth Around the Sun Space is vast and lonely. It is perfectly understandable, then, that a little rock would decide to tag along with Earth and the moon on their yearly circumnavigation of the sun. Said rock, 165 feet long, was discovered in 2016 by Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid-hunting telescope. This eccentric entity’s Hawaiian name, (469219) Kamoʻoalewa, means “wobbling celestial object.” As it repeatedly loops around Earth…more

What is Elon Musk’s Starship? Elon Musk is developing a vehicle that could be a game-changer for space travel. Starship, as it’s known, will be a fully reusable transport system capable of carrying up to 100 people to the Red Planet. The founding ethos of Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company SpaceX was to make life multi-planetary. He says that settling humans on other worlds…more

 The Hubble Telescope Checks In With the Most Distant Planets You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows on Jupiter. All you need is the keen eyesight of the Hubble Space Telescope for a close-up look at the candy-colored ribbons of clouds and storms on the face of the solar system’s largest planet. Every year the Hubble is deployed to make a visual “grand tour”…more

NASA Launches New Mission: Crash Into Asteroid, Defend Planet Earth It was 2017, and astronomers projected an asteroid the size of a cruise ship would strike Japan sometime in the next decade. Scientists and government officials from NASA and other space agencies, gathered at an annual planetary defense conference in Tokyo, hastily devised a plan to knock the asteroid off its path toward Earth…more