LightSail is a crowdfunded solar sail project from the Planetary Society which launched this week on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Deployment in space of the cubesat with attached solar sail is due on July 2.
NASA has revealed that an insecure Raspberry Pi was used as an access point for hackers into the network of NASA's jet Propulsion Laboratory. The hackers stole 500MB of data which included information about international transfers of restricted military and pace technology.
NASA is to open up the International Space Station (ISS) to tourists from 2020, at the cost of $35,000 per night PPS. The price doesn't include transfers to and from earth, which are estimated at $60m each way!
Scientists have published the results of the study of the NASA twin astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly in Science Magazine. The experiment studies the physiological, molecular and cognitive changes that can happen to a human during a prolonged space mission. Scott Kelly was in the International Space Station for one year while his twin Mark stayed on earth, which allowed scientists to compare the effects of the space mission between the two identical twins.
Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first ever picture of a black hole this week! Using a data from an array of telescopes around the globe, the team combined the massive amounts of data to create the image of M87. Dr. Katie Bouman created the machine learning interferometry algorithm used to combine the data and produce the image of the event horizon.
The New York Times have published a nice data visualisation of the 14 year journey taken by NASA's opportunity rover over 28 miles of the surface of Mars.
Dr. James O'Donoghue uses NASA Imagery to create an animation of the speed of light between Earth and Mars, in real time. By comparison, check out his animation of the speed light between Earth and The Moon also.
China's Chang’e-4 space probe has sent the first 360 photo of the moon's surface back from the far side of our nearest neighbour. The image has been converted into a panorama which can be seen here.
The first object in history to pass through the solar system and to be identified as originating outside the solar system was discovered in October 2017 by Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk in Hawaii. The object was named Oumuamua, which in Hawaiian means first distant messenger.
