Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Literally

Lucy, a spacecraft set to visit an unprecedented number of asteroids in an unprecedented flight also will be carrying diamonds. Lucy is named after the partial hominid skeleton found in Ethiopia in 1974. Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and a graduate student discovered a fossil of a human ancestor who had lived 3.2 million years ago. After...

Space ORCs???

https://medievaluniverses.fandom.com/wiki/Orc No, not those orcs... In astronomy, an Odd radio circle (ORC) is a very large unexplained astronomical object that, at radio wavelengths, is highly circular and brighter along its edges, but invisible to infrared, x-ray, and visible light. As of 26 June 2020, there have been four such objects (and possibly six more) observed....

K2 18b Has a Damp Atmosphere

In 2015 Kepler found this planet orbiting a red dwarf star some 110 light years from Earth, twice as wide as Earth, and has eight times Earth’s mass. It's not exactly Earth-like, but it does orbit within the habitable zone of that star. In 2016 and 2017 using the Hubble, a team discovered that the...

Isreal orbits the moon, but fails to land

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/israel-moon-landing-beresheet.html Beresheet, which means “Genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew, would have been the first robotic lander on the moon built by a private organization, Space IL from Israel. With high hopes, the mission began. It rocketed off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in February, orbited the moon, took a selfie, and then...

Tesla and Starman

So it's been a year since Starman the mannequin was launched into space in his cherry red Tesla Roadster with Hot Wheels model Tesla on the dash. The car is 226 million miles from Earth now. There is a really cool website run by Programmer Ben Pearson that counts Starman's distance as he travels at...

We were published!

Did you know that we were published in Martian Magazine in September? It's called "Peace Tour" https://themartianmagazine.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/peace-tour-by-hawk-and-young/ It's 100 word story, called a Drabble, about touring an alien spaceship. What do you think the aliens were thinking of their human guests?  

Learning from Failure

We are all taught that failure is bad as we learn in school. You were grounded for getting Fs and rewarded for getting As. We love to report space victories, but the truth is, we learn from our failures. On October 11, a seemingly routine Roscosmos launch to the International Space Station went a bit...

New Constellations

Sure, you can pick out Orion, the big and little dippers, and the North star. Maybe you even know your other zodiac constellations, but those are all in the sky visible to our naked eye. But if you are mapping gamma rays, you can see many more stars in space than from Earth. Scientists using...

TESS discovers 2 planets

As we are kind of alien nuts over here at Hawk and Young, and as it's totally possible that some form of life is out there somewhere, we are so pleased to report that Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has found two new planets orbiting 'near by' stars and 73 possible other planets causing dips...

India and the UK put Satellites in Space

If you live in the Western Hemisphere, you know all about NASA and SpaceX, but you hardly hear about India and ISRO - Indian Space Research Organisation. Since 1993, India has been launching satellites for other countries, contracting their reliable rocket as a taxi for satellites. They only failed 2 or 3 times to deliver...