Space News

The Arecibo Telescope in early November after a main cable snapped. On December 1st, 2020, it was announced that the telescope at the Arecibo Observatory collapsed completely. The Arecibo Observatory, based in Puerto Rico, had one of the world's largest single-dish radio telescopes with a diameter of 305 meters (1,000 feet) and was a leading contributor to a range of astronomy-related sciences. The telescope had partially collapsed in early November 2020 after a main cable snapped, leading the National Science Foundation to announce plans to decommission and disassemble the telescope, and it is now clear with the most recent collapse...

Artist's depiction of OSIRIS-REx preparing to tag Asteroid Bennu for the Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample event. Yesterday, on October 20th, 2020, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made contact with Bennu, an asteroid around 2 hundred million miles away from Earth. Its robotic arm extended outwards, and as it touched down on the loose, rocky surface it collected a sample from the asteroid, which it will now endeavor to return to Earth by 2023. Now I want to start by addressing perhaps the most obvious question: Why is this important? This won't have been the first sample we've collected of asteroid material. In fact,...

First image capture of a black hole, taken in 2019. Last week, the 2020 Physics Nobel Prize was awarded to three researchers - half of it to Roger Penrose, and the other half jointly awarded to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez (the fourth woman to earn the physics Nobel Prize!). Everyone in the astro community was thrilled that it has now been 2 years in a row that the physics Nobel Prize goes to space-related areas, first exoplanet research in 2019, and now in 2020 to black hole research! Here's a brief breakdown of their black hole research: In the...