Beams of light > Spectrum of lights > Space Exploration
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Every day satellites are zooming through space, snapping incredible pictures of Earth, the solar system and outer space. Here are the highlights from the latest photographs received on April, 2016.
The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on NASA's Landsat 8 satellite acquired this large natural-color image showing a view of the Caspian Sea around the Tyuleniy Archipelago.
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The US aerospace company SpaceX has successfully landed a resusable rocket on an ocean platform, after four previous attempts failed. It was returning from delivering an inflatable habitat into space for Nasa. The inflatable room will attach to the International Space Station (ISS) for a two-year test and become the first such habitat for humans in orbit.
It reached the ISS around 09:00 GMT on Sunday April 10, 2016 along with other freight aboard the Dragon capsule. Built by Nevada company Bigelow Aerospace, the habitat is intended to pave the way towards the use of such rooms for long space trips, including to Mars.
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A team of scientists announced on Thursday, February 11, 2016 that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago. It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding part of his theory.
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Astronomers say a Neptune-sized planet lurks beyond Pluto. Scientists announced evidence that a body nearly the size of Neptune—but as yet unseen—orbits the sun every 15,000 years. During the solar system's infancy 4.5 billion years ago, the giant planet was knocked out of the planet-forming region near the sun. Slowed down by gas, the planet settled into a distant elliptical orbit, where it still lurks today.
The quest has been plagued by far-fetched claims and even outright quackery. But the new evidence comes from a pair of respected planetary scientists, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, who prepared for the inevitable skepticism with detailed analyses of the orbits of other distant objects and months of computer simulations.
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Elon Musk says that SpaceX's successful landing of an orbital rocket stage boosts his confidence that the colonization of Mars is possible. Musk's company, SpaceX, successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station during an orbital launch on December 21, 2015. The historic accomplishment brings SpaceX a big step closer to developing fully and rapidly reusable rockets — technology that Musk says is vital to the colonization of Mars.
