Great Observatories program

For more than three years, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has been idly coasting around the Sun while locked in a retirement safe mode,while its successor, the Webb Telescope, took over its cosmic observation duties. An upcoming servicing mission, however, could give the old telescope a new purpose: protecting Earth from dangerous asteroids.Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their ViewThis week, Washington-based company Rhea Space Activity announced that it has been selected to develop…

An artist’s concept of LUVOIR, a 15-meter telescope that was an early NASA concept for a future space telescope. The newly described Habitable Worlds Telescope wouldn’t be quite as large as this.NASA officials disclosed information about a planned next-generation space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, during a recent session of the American Astronomical Society, In the session, Mark Clampin, the Astrophysics Division Director NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, offered a few details aboutthe telescope, which…

If you’ve ever looked up into the night sky and seen a bedazzlement of stars, you know awe: the rare moment that bewilderment feels good. The scale of the universe and huge diversity of the objects within it never fail to inspire amazement.This year, we got to see some of those objects in newfound resolution and vibrance. State-of-the-art technologies—especially the recently launched Webb Space Telescope—have revolutionized our view of the cosmos and allowed scientists to peer farther back in time, atsome of the faintest…

2,500 years ago, one of space’s most beautiful features was born: the Southern Ring Nebula. The nebula was vividly imaged by the Webb Space Telescope earlier this year, and astronomers now think they know exactly how a star’s violent outburst occurred, leaving the elegant nebula in its wake.The star that bore the nebula was about three times the size of the Sun and 500 million years old. That’s quite young, in stellar terms; our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and should live for another 5 billion.Around 2,500 years…

Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. DalcantonThe James Webb Space Telescope has been getting all the attention these days, but Hubble, in space since 1990, continues to make stunning astronomical observations.The latest Hubble image shows Arp-Madore 417-391, a galactic merger located 670 million light years from Earth. The celestial spectacle can be seen from the southern hemisphere in the Eridanus constellation. As NASA explains, the “two galaxies were distorted by…

NASA officials spoke at a House subcommittee hearing Wednesday morning about the status of the Webb Space Telescope, which has been capturing images of the universe near and far since early this summer. During the meeting, they revealed Webb’s latest portrait: a shot of a dark cloud called L1527 and the light emanating from a protostar at its core.L1527 is about 460 light-years from Earth and stretches 0.3 light-years across. At its center there is a protostar, a very young star that is still forming. The cloud was…

Side-by-side shots of the the dwarf galaxy Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte, taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Webb Space Telescope, reveal the impressive resolution offered by the newer telescope. Star Wars: Shatterpoint Announcement Trailer02:27The First Things To Do In VR, Part 3Today 9:39AMWolf-Lundmark-Melotte is an isolated dwarf galaxy about 3 million light-years from the Milky Way and roughly 10 times smaller. Its galactic halo is about 8,000 light-years across and is thought to be fairly ancient.It was first…

This summer, Webb Space Telescope imaged a pair of merging galaxies known as IC 1623 A and B (collectively, just IC 1623). Now, the veteran Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new shot of the same pair, after first imaging them back in 2008. The differences in the two views showcase the varying strengths of these telescopes, as one sees the universe primarily in visible and ultraviolet light and the other sees in infrared.The galaxy merger was first discovered in 1897, and the Hubble and Webb telescopes offer remarkable…

A photo of the Hubble Space Telescope captured by an astronaut aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in 2009.Photo: NASANASA has signed an agreement with SpaceX to test the feasibility of using a commercial crew to raise the orbit of Hubble and extend its lifespan. The Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990, and it has been delivering groundbreaking views of the cosmos ever since. Thenewly launched Webb telescope is cool and everything, but Hubble is the OG of space telescopes. Unfortunately, the aging telescope…

Hubble and Webb images showing the immediate effects of the DART experiment to deflect an asteroid. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScIFresh imagesfrom two famous space-based telescopes are shedding new light on NASA’s DART mission to deflect a harmless asteroid.The NASA spacecraft intentionally crashed into Dimorphos on the evening of September 26 following a 10-month journey to the binary asteroid system. Dimorphos, a football stadium-sized moonlet, and its larger companion, Didymos, are roughly 6.8 million miles (11…