Caitlin Milera

Just in time to distract from the chaos in Washington, DC, SpaceX is working toward another high-altitude test flight of its next-generation spaceflight system.

The latest prototype of Elon Musk’s Starship, which is identified by the serial number SN9, underwent a brief test firing of its Raptor engines at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, development facility on Wednesday. The test is part of a series of checks, which may include another static fire, leading up to a launch that could come as soon as Friday.

Read the full article here.

Image Credit: Republic World

We are devastated to announce that Robert Winglee, director of Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium and of the Northwest Earth and Space Sciences Pipeline, has passed away.  He quite suddenly had a heart attack on December 24 and did not recover.

Robert was passionate about sharing his love of space and space science with others, and his impact went far beyond Seattle or the Pacific Northwest.  We invite you to join us in remembering him.  Please share your memories of Robert using #WingItLikeWinglee on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

A celebration of his life will be held in the new year — we’ll share details when they’re available.

Robert Winglee also served on the National Space Grant Foundation board from Jan. 1, 2013 to Dec. 31, 2015. We sincerely thank him for his service to the organization.

Original Article

Credit: Washington Space Grant Consortium

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope watched a mysterious dark vortex on Neptune abruptly steer away from a likely death on the giant blue planet.

The storm, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, was born in the planet’s northern hemisphere and discovered by Hubble in 2018. Observations a year later showed that it began drifting southward toward the equator, where such storms are expected to vanish from sight. To the surprise of observers, Hubble spotted the vortex change direction by August 2020, doubling back to the north. Though Hubble has tracked similar dark spots over the past 30 years, this unpredictable atmospheric behavior is something new to see.

Equally as puzzling, the storm was not alone. Hubble spotted another, smaller dark spot in January this year that temporarily appeared near its larger cousin. It might possibly have been a piece of the giant vortex that broke off, drifted away, and then disappeared in subsequent observations.

Read the full article.

Saturn and Jupiter will appear to almost kiss this winter solstice, although not because of some cosmic mistletoe hanging overhead.

Rather, the two gas giants will look as though they’re very close in the night sky in an event known as a “great conjunction,” which happens roughly every 20 years. In reality, Saturn and Jupiter will be hundreds of millions of miles apart from each other.

This year’s great conjunction will be exceptionally close — just a tenth of a degree apart, or one-fifth of a full moon’s diameter. The last time Saturn and Jupiter looked this cozy was July 16, 1623, back when the famous Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was alive, according to Space.com, a Live Science sister site.

Read the full article.

A 12-year-old boy in Atlanta has dreams of going to Mars. Those dreams are not far-fetched, as the boy has already been accepted into college.

Caleb Anderson is not your typical 12-year-old.

He is currently enrolled in high school and takes classes at a local technical college. In the fall of 2021, he expects to enroll at Georgia Tech.

Read the full article and watch the news clip.

David Tucker had spent nearly 20 years cooking at restaurants and hotels, with the last eight spent as a sous chef. “When everyone else is excited for a holiday and saying, ‘Yay! It’s Thanksgiving!’ I would think, “Okay so that just means I get to work twice as hard now.” He was in his mid-30’s when he realized he just wasn’t happy and wanted more for himself.

So, he enrolled at Thomas Nelson Community College (TNCC) on a whim. “It was kind of daunting at first, being out of school for that long. And you don’t even write or use a computer when you’re working in the kitchens, it’s just non-stop hands-on work.” Still, he knew he wanted to change his own trajectory somehow. “I wasn’t even sure about what major to take. I knew I was good with my hands, putting things together, so I decided on Mechanical Engineering Technology. I thought there would always be a need for engineering.”

When he took that path he never thought a career at NASA was a possibility, until a teacher came in one day and encouraged students to apply for the STEM Takes Flight program https://vsgc.odu.edu/stemtakesflight/.

Read the full article.

A few years ago, Vanessa Wyche was in the launch control complex at Kennedy Space Center when she saw a woman wearing a Clemson University lanyard attached to a NASA badge.

“Hey,” she said excitedly to Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.

Despite studying at Clemson’s engineering department for a few years at the same time, the women had never met.

Read the full article.

Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly want to bring gravitational wave astronomy to speakers of the language.

WHENEVER HER SON DETECTS A strange force rippling in the fabric of spacetime, such as a gravitational wave or binary black hole, Sharon Yellowfly begins the delicate work of translating the vocabulary of his work—astrophysics—into Blackfoot, an indigenous language. Blackfoot traditionally has no words for these kinds of observations. Sometimes her act of translation is as simple as mashing two words together. Other times, it rises to the level of poetry. After hearing an astronomer describe the sound black holes make as a “chirp,” Yellowfly translated the term into biixiini_gi, or “bird singing.”

Read the full article, authored by Sabrina Imbler.

Research that unveiled the most mysterious objects in the cosmos has garnered science’s highest honor.

Three scientists who cemented the reality of black holes have been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany and Andrea Ghez of UCLA will split the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 6.

Black holes are massive objects with a gravitational field so strong that nothing can escape once it falls within, not even light. At their centers, black holes harbor a puzzling zone called a singularity, where the laws of physics cease to make sense.

Read the full article here.

Image Credit: NRAO, AUI, NSF, D. BERRY/SKYWORKS