Repurposed ICBM Launched Secret US Spy Satellites From California
A Northrop Grumman Minotaur IV rocket launched the NROL-174 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It was the first launch of a Minotaur IV from the site since 2011, the NRO said via X. Credit: Staff Sgt. Joshua LeRoi / Space Launch Delta 30 | edited by Space.com
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5 hours ago
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Japanese spacecraft goes dark during attempted moon landing. Its payload would have been a world-first.
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The status of a private Japanese moon lander — which was carrying Europe's first lunar rover — is in question after ground control suddenly lost contact with the spacecraft on Thursday (June 5). Mission control lost contact with the lander, known as "Resilience," at 3:17 p.m ET, just as it was attempting a lunar touchdown. The rover, known as "Tenacious," is one of several payloads carried aboard Resilience, the second Hakuto-R lander made and operated by Japanese company ispace. The spacecraft attempted to touch down in an unexplored region of the moon's northern hemisphere known as Mare Frigoris, or the "Sea of Cold," after spending just over a month in lunar orbit. After several hours, ground control has yet to reestablish contact with the lander, and the status of its payload is unknown. "We have not yet been able to establish communication with RESILIENCE, but ispace engineers in our Mission Control Center are continuing to work to contact the lander," ispace representatives wrote in a statement posted to X. "We will share an update with the latest information in a media announcement in the next few hours." Resilience is the third Japanese lander to attempt to touch down on the moon, following ispace's first Hakuto-R lander, which crash-landed in April 2023 after losing contact with its operators in orbit, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's SLIM lander (or "moon sniper"), which landed upside down in January 2024 but unexpectedly survived two lunar nights. Resilience launched Jan. 15 on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Live Science's sister site reported at the time. The same rocket also launched Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, which successfully landed on the moon on March 2, after taking a more direct route. Related: 'Everything has changed since Apollo': Why landing on the moon is still incredibly difficult If successful, Resilience would be just the second private lunar lander to complete a soft landing on the moon. Its main payload, the Tenacious rover, would be the first European-built vehicle to roam the moon. Tenacious is small, measuring roughly 21 inches (54 centimeters) long and weighing just 11 pounds (5 kilograms). But its most-talked-about payload — a tiny, red house dubbed "The Moonhouse" — is even teenier, standing just 4 inches (10 cm) tall. The art piece, dubbed the "first house on the moon," was created by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, who first envisioned the project in 1999. "To me, the Moonhouse is both a shared achievement, something made possible by the efforts of many individuals, but also a profoundly personal thing," Genberg recently told "It's a small house in a vast, empty place, a symbol of belonging, curiosity, and vulnerability." Tenacious planned to roam the Sea of Cold for up to two weeks. It would then likely die during the "lunar night," when its solar panels can no longer collect light, according to ESA. RELATED STORIES —Will Earth ever lose its moon? —Why can't we see the far side of the moon? —How many moons are in the solar system? During this time, the rover would conduct various additional experiments, including using a tiny scoop to collect a small amount of lunar regolith, which could be returned to Earth on a future mission. NASA has already agreed to buy the sample for $5,000, according to Sky News. The Resilience lander is also carrying several other payloads, including the Water Electrolyzer Experiment, which aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of producing oxygen and hydrogen from "lunar water resources"; an algae-based food production module, which would attempt to grow the photosynthetic organism as a potential future food source for lunar astronauts; and the Deep Space Radiation Probe, which would track the amount of radiation the lander will experience on the moon, according to
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7 hours ago
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Building the 'Moonhouse': Q&A with artist Mikael Genberg
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A dream that Mikael Genberg has nurtured for more than a quarter century could come true today (June 5). The Swedish artist's "Moonhouse," a project he devised way back in 1999, is set to touch down on the moon this afternoon aboard Resilience, a lander operated by the Japanese company ispace. The artwork — a tiny replica of the red-and-white houses that dot the Swedish countryside — is mounted on the front bumper of Tenacious, a microrover built by ispace's European subsidiary. If Resilience touches down safely today and everything thereafter goes to plan as well, Tenacious will deploy from the lander and drop the Moonhouse onto the lunar dirt, giving the gray landscape a solitary spark of vibrant color. caught up with Genberg via email recently to discuss the Moonhouse, how he's feeling with the touchdown try just around the corner and what a successful landing would mean to him. The questions and answers are presented below in their entirety. How and when did you first get the idea to put a little Swedish house on the moon? Mikael Genberg: Working as an artist is, in many ways, about trying to describe the world, life, and human beings from different perspectives. All culture is essentially that: describing and re-describing what it means to be here. The house, as a symbol, holds in my mind a unique combination of survival and beauty. When I first imagined a typical Swedish house standing on the moon, I instantly felt the power of the image, but also its impossibility. I had no competence, no funding, no connections. Still, the thought didn't leave me. I started talking about it, first with close friends, then with others. Gradually, a sense of shared purpose, or something like that, began to form around the idea. Somehow, the concept managed to survive, and even grow, for 26 years, carried forward by its own poetry, craziness and hardship and by the incredible support of people who believed in it. That persistence of the idea itself is kind of an artwork. What does this piece mean to you? What do you hope it achieves, or how do you hope it affects people? Genberg: To me, the Moonhouse is both a shared achievement, something made possible by the efforts of many individuals, but also a profoundly personal thing. Being able to touch the moon with a small house that I painted in the kitchen of our red house from 1758 creates deeper emotions than I expected. It's like putting my finger on that distant white disc in the sky. An impossibility that comes to life. It's a small house in a vast, empty place, a symbol of belonging, curiosity, and vulnerability. I hope it invites people to reflect on our relationship to space, and to recognize the fragility and uniqueness of our own world, this Pale Blue Dot, packed with life, all related to each other. The Moonhouse doesn't claim anything except maybe to be art, but even that is of no real interest. It's a small red house standing on the moon. That's all. How do you feel now, being so close to the lunar landing? What emotions are running through you? Genberg: It's a strange mix of awe, anxiety, disbelief, and sheer, childish happiness. So many things have had to go right just to reach this point. There's excitement, of course, but also a deep sense of humility in understanding the challenges that still lie ahead. I'm trying not to get swept away by the emotions entirely, but instead to stay present in this moment. Whatever comes next. What would mission success — Tenacious deploying the Moonhouse onto the gray dirt — mean to you? What would it mean to humanity? Genberg: If it works, if the Moonhouse actually stands there on the lunar surface, I think it would be a moment of something extraordinary. Maybe more poetry than art. For me personally, it would be the culmination of imagination, persistence, and collaboration with so many wonderful people. As for what it might mean to humanity, that's really up to each person. I love that people have already responded in their own creative ways: sending us songs, children's drawings, poems. That, to me, is success, when an idea sparks new ideas in others. I hope the Moonhouse can become a small cultural marker. Something that says: we were here, and we brought not just our technology, but our dreams, our symbols of home. We come in peace. Related stories: — Japanese company ispace will attempt historic moon landing on June 5 — Little house on the (moon) prairie: Artist's 'Moonhouse' set to lift off on lunar lander — Japan's ispace unveils microrover for its 2nd moon mission What if Resilience fails during its landing attempt on June 5? Will you still regard the Moonhouse project as a success? Genberg: That's hard to say. In the moment, I'm sure I would feel deep disappointment. But with some distance, I believe I'll be able to see how the Moonhouse has already succeeded in many ways. It exists. It was built. It sparked thoughts, conversations and creativity across the world. Of course, I hope it lands safely. But I also accept that space missions are, by nature, super-risky. No matter what happens, the House will reach the moon. The only question is in what shape.
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8 hours ago
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James Webb Space Telescope reveals largest-ever panorama of the early universe
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have unveiled the largest map of the early universe to date, a sweeping cosmic panorama that offers seasoned scientists and curious stargazers alike a front-row seat to the ancient cosmos. The images come from COSMOS-Web, the largest observing program the James Webb Space Telescope undertook in its first year. It surveyed a patch of sky equivalent to the width of three full moons placed side-by-side, the telescope's widest observation area to date. The survey stitched together more than 10,000 exposures, revealing nearly 800,000 galaxies, many of which shine from the universe's earliest eras. Harnessing the abundance of data that came from this effort, on Thursday (June 5), the team released the largest contiguous image ever captured by the JWST, along with a free, interactive catalog detailing the properties of each galaxy — a cosmic record that's as vast as it is richly detailed. "I don't know if the James Webb Space Telescope will ever cover an area of this size again, and so I think it'll be a good reference and a good data set that people will use for many years," Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and the lead researcher of COSMOS-Web, told "The hope is that, now, anybody at any institution can make use of this data for their own science." When the JWST launched in 2021, the global COSMOS-Web team comprising nearly 50 researchers from institutions around the world was awarded over 200 hours of observation time, the most allocated to any project in the telescope's inaugural year. While many JWST studies zoom in on small, deep slices of sky, COSMOS-Web prioritized breadth, capturing a wider cosmic canvas that brought to light 10 times more galaxies than astronomers anticipated from these early epochs. "It was incredible to reveal galaxies that were previously invisible at other wavelengths, and very gratifying to finally see them appear on our computers," Maximilien Franco, postdoctoral researcher of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., said in a statement. The JWST's expansive view allows astronomers not only to catalog distant galaxies, but also to study how their characteristics — including size, shape and brightness — are shaped by their cosmic environments, such as whether they reside in isolation or in crowded regions. "That tells us a lot about what influenced them as they evolved," Kartaltepe said. Alongside the catalog, the COSMOS-Web team has published a series of scientific papers exploring the data. One study, posted to the preprint archive arXiv on Wednesday (June 4), examines the most luminous galaxies at the centers of galaxy groups, tracing how their structure and star forming activity have co-evolved over the past 12 billion years. A key science goal of the project was to map the earliest structures during the Reionization Era (which fell more than 13 billion years ago) when the first galaxies ignited and began clearing the thick hydrogen fog that blanketed the early cosmos. To achieve this, Kartaltepe and her team plan early galaxies as tracers to measure the size of "reionization bubbles," vast regions where light from stars and galaxies carved clearings in the primordial haze. "That's not something we finished yet," Kartaltepe said. "But that was the main goal, and something that we're really excited about." Another paper, which was also posted to arXiv on Wednesday, tests a machine learning technique that can estimate the physical properties of galaxies in the massive dataset. The team also developed a new method to measure the brightness of distant galaxies more accurately. Unlike traditional techniques that simply sum the light within a fixed area, this approach models how light is spread across a galaxy, enabling more precise measurements that allow researchers to combine JWST images with blurrier ground-based data without losing important details. Related Stories: — James Webb Space Telescope finds coldest exoplanet ever seen, and it orbits a dead star — James Webb Space Telescope captures stunning images of bright auroras on Jupiter (video) — Calling citizen scientists! Help NASA's Galaxy Zoo classify galaxies seen by James Webb Space Telescope Three more studies detail the team's data processing efforts over the past two years, a meticulous process involving aligning and cleaning more than 10,000 individual images. As a brand-new observatory, the JWST brought unexpected challenges. The telescope's images included unforeseen artifacts, such as noise patterns and distortions, which the team had to carefully correct. Despite these hurdles, the JWST outperformed pre-launch models predicting how faint or distant galaxies it could detect, said Kartaltepe. "The reality turned out to be better — we were able to go deeper than what we expected." The catalog holds "incredible potential," she added. "There's still so much we don't know."
