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Aftershock II, the latest rocket designed and built by the student-run USC Rocket Propulsion Lab (USCRPL) at the University of Southern California (USC), has broken the international civilian-built rocket altitude record – reaching further into space than any non-governmental and non-commercial group has ever flown before. Aftershock II officially became the highest and fastest civilian-built rocket of all time following its successful launch to space on October 20, 2024. A post-flight internal data review concluded that the rocket achieved a world-record altitude of 470,400 feet and a top speed of 5283 feet per second (Mach 5.5).

Test pilot Roy Martin: “Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. We just fixed it.” NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft, developed at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, has fired up its engine for the first time. These engine-run tests start at low power and allow the X-59 team to verify that the aircraft’s systems are working together properly while powered by its own engine. The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which seeks to demonstrate how the X-59 can fly supersonic without generating loud sonic booms and then survey what people hear when it flies overhead. Public reaction to the quieter sonic "thumps," which should be no louder than a car door shutting, will be shared with regulators who will then consider writing new sound-based rules to lift the ban on faster-than-sound flight over land. First flight of the X-59 is scheduled for 2025.

Since it arrived at Jupiter in 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been probing beneath the dense, forbidding clouds encircling the giant planet – the first orbiter to peer so closely. It seeks answers to questions about the origin and evolution of Jupiter, our Solar System, and giant planets across the cosmos. During a recent close encounter with Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this color-enhanced view of the giant planet’s northern hemisphere. It provides a detailed view of chaotic clouds and cyclonic storms in an area known to scientists as a folded filamentary region. In these regions, the zonal jets that create the familiar banded patterns in Jupiter’s clouds break down, leading to turbulent patterns and cloud structures that rapidly evolve over the course of only a few days.

Welcome to the night sky report for November 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. This month, hunt for the fainter constellations of fall, including Pisces, Aries, and Triangulum. They will guide you to several galaxies, including the spiral galaxies M74 (NGC 628, the Phantom Galaxy) and M33 (NGC 598, the Triangulum Galaxy). Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter can be observed during the month. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

NASA’s Europa Clipper has embarked on its long voyage to Jupiter, where it will investigate Europa, a moon with an enormous subsurface ocean that may have conditions to support life. The spacecraft launched on October 14, 2024 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft is the largest that NASA has ever built for a mission headed to another planet. Europa Clipper also is the first NASA mission dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth. The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) on a trajectory that will leverage the power of gravity assists, first to Mars in four months and then back to Earth for another gravity assist flyby in 2026. After it begins orbiting Jupiter in April 2030, the spacecraft will fly past Europa 49 times.

Mars wasn’t always the cold desert we see today. There’s increasing evidence that water once flowed on the Red Planet’s surface billions of years ago. And if there was water, there must also have been a thick atmosphere to keep that water from freezing. But sometime around 3.5 billion years ago, the water dried up and the air, once heavy with carbon dioxide, dramatically thinned leaving only the wisp of an atmosphere that clings to the planet today. Where exactly did the Martian atmosphere go? This question has been a central mystery of the planet’s 4.6 billion year history. For two MIT geologists, the answer may lie in the planet’s clay. They propose that much of the missing atmosphere could be locked up in the planet’s clay surface as methane — a form of carbon that could be stored undisturbed for eons.

Welcome to the night sky report for October 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. The highlight of this October is a potentially bright comet (C/2023 A3 aka Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) that will appear around mid-month. In addition, Venus, Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter can be observed along with the Moon. The crisp, clear October nights are also full of celestial showpieces for the deep sky observer. For example, find Pegasus the flying horse of Greek mythology to pinpoint nice dense globular clusters and galaxies. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

Fritz Zwicky was not a shy person – He called them like he saw them. And he was very outspoken about his views. He, for example, was the first astrophysicist to come up with the concept of Dark Matter in 1933. He also had very strong views about redshift. Zwicky's contention was that the redshift observed from Earth was not because the galaxies were moving faster and faster away from us, but because the light photons were being shifted toward the red side of the spectrum as they lost energy while traveling long distances through space. Zwicky proposed that the longer the light traveled, the more energy it lost, leading to an illusion that galaxies that were more distant from Earth were also moving faster. His “Tired Light Theory” was largely ignored and neglected at the time (and even today), as astronomers adopted the more popular Big Bang Theory as the consensus model of the Universe. Now, new peer-reviewed research from Kansas State University shows that Fritz Zwicky may actually have been right, putting the whole narrative supporting the Big Bang Theory into question.

Welcome to the night sky report for September 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. During the month you will have an opportunity to view five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), as well as a supermoon eclipse and a NASA solar sail satellite. In September, Pegasus becomes increasingly prominent in the southeastern sky, allowing skywatchers to locate globular clusters M2 (NGC 7089), M30 (NGC 7099), as well as a nearby double star, Alpha Capricorni, which is an optical double (but not a binary pair). Also, if you have access to dark skies away from urban light pollution, you might be able to get a glimpse of the faint, glowing pillar of the zodiacal light, which is sunlight reflecting off of an interplanetary dust cloud between Earth and the inner fringes of the main asteroid belt, just past Mars. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

It may seem like the Sun is stationary while the orbiting planets are moving, but actually the Sun is also orbiting around the Milky Way Galaxy at an impressive rate of about 220 kilometers per second — almost half a million miles per hour. As swift as that may seem, when a faint red star was discovered moving even faster across the sky, clocking in at a speed of about 1.3 million miles per hour (600 kilometers per second), scientists took notice. Located just 400 light-years from Earth, this rare stellar speedster is the first “hypervelocity” very low mass star found. More remarkably, this star may be on an unusual trajectory that could cause it to leave the Milky Way Galaxy altogether based on research led by University of California (UC) San Diego Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Adam Burgasser. This hypervelocity star was found thanks to the efforts of citizen-scientists and a team of astronomers from around the country using several telescopes, including two in Hawaii – W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii Island and the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS on the peak of Haleakala in Maui. So how did the volunteer citizen-scientists contribute? This project capitalized on the keen ability of humans, who are evolutionarily programmed to look for patterns and spot anomalies in a way that is unmatched by computer technology. Volunteers tagged what they perceived to be moving objects in the large data files and when enough volunteers tagged the same object, astronomers investigated and eventually made the discovery.

The Universe is teeming with galaxies, each brimming with billions of stars. Though all galaxies shine brightly, many are cloaked in dust while others are so distant that to observers on Earth they appear as little more than faint smudges. By creating comprehensive maps of even the dimmest and most-distant galaxies, astronomers are better able to study the structure of the Universe. The largest such map to date has just grown even larger, with the tenth data release from the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey. The DESI Legacy Imaging Survey expands on the data included in two earlier companion surveys: the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Legacy Survey and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey. Jointly these three surveys imaged 14,000 square degrees of the sky visible from the northern hemisphere. This ambitious six-year effort involved three telescopes, one petabyte (1000 trillion bytes) of data, and 100 million CPU hours on one of the world’s most powerful computers at the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

Welcome to the night sky report for August 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. Provided you have clear skies, viewing conditions for the Perseid meteors will be favorable this year. In mid-August there will be a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Mars. Also, in August, a number of star-studded figures soar overhead. Look for the constellation Lyra, shaped as a small parallelogram, which points to Epsilon Lyrae and the Ring Nebula (M57, NGC 6720). You can also spot three bright summer stars: Vega, Deneb, and Altair, which form the Summer Triangle. Keep observing around the group of stars commonly known as the Teapot and you’ll be looking toward the center of the Milky Way. In that direction, you can see the Lagoon Nebula (M8, NGC 6523), August is also a great month to learn an easy-to-spot constellation – Cygnus the swan. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase, so get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

55 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon in the lunar module “Eagle.” “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” -- Phrases that recall humanity’s first landing on the lunar surface. On that day, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, as a team, completed humanity’s first landing on the Moon and they fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s national goal, set in May 1962, to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. For many of us, that adventure is as fresh in our memories today, 55 years later, as if it happened just yesterday.

The vociferous debate between the dark matter community and the MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics or Modified Gravity) community continues. Like two sluggers in the middle of the ring delivering blows to each other in a boxing match, this fight has raged on for years. Now, in a breakthrough discovery that challenges the conventional understanding of cosmology, scientists at Case Western Reserve University have unearthed new evidence that could reshape our perception of dark matter. According to standard Newtonian gravity, stars on the outer edges of a galaxy should be slower due to diminished gravitational pull. This has never been observed, leading to the inference decades ago of an invented concept called dark matter, which has yet to be proven to exist. But even if it did exist, dark matter halos should come to an end at some point, so rotation curves should not remain flat indefinitely. This new analysis at Case Western Reserve defies this expectation, providing a startling revelation: The influence of what we call dark matter extends far beyond previous estimates, stretching at least a million light-years from the galactic center. Surprisingly, rotation curves of galaxies remain flat for millions of light years with no end in sight. Such a long range effect may indicate that the concept of dark matter—as we understand it—might not exist at all.