Watch lead spacewalk officer at NASA’s mission Paul Dum provided a step-by-step preview of Tim Peake and Tim Kopra’s spacewalk to make repairs to the International Space Station.
Observing
Watch the International Space Station pass overhead from the UK
Have you ever seen the International Space Station (ISS)? It’s capable of exceeding Venus at its brightest and visible for up to 7 minutes as it crawls across the sky in an arc from west to east. Find out when and where to see some favourable passes of this 450-tonne, 109-metre-long spacecraft over the British Isles and Western Europe this week.
News
Fermi space telescope expands its search for dark matter
Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever. Although experiments on the ground and in space have yet to find a trace of dark matter, six or more years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has broadened the mission’s dark matter hunt using some novel approaches.
Picture This
Mercury and International Space Station transit the Sun
French astrophotographer Thierry Legault travelled to the suburbs of Philadelphia, USA to capture both the International Space Station and planet Mercury transiting the Sun on 9 May. This image includes multiple stacked frames to show the Station’s path in the fraction of a second it took to cross the Sun, while Mercury appears as a black dot at bottom-centre.