(Launch webcast begins at 9:30 p.m. BST)
Live coverage of the Atlas 5 rocket flight with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return probe from our colleagues at Spaceflight Now. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the globular cluster NGC 1854, a gathering of white and blue stars in the southern constellation of Dorado. NGC 1854 is located about 135,000 light-years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of our closest cosmic neighbours and a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made a historic New Year’s encounter with an object nicknamed Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt a billion miles beyond Pluto. The probe passed around 3,500 kilometres from the mysterious object at 0533 GMT on New Year’s Day, making it the most distant Solar System body ever explored up close.
Astronomers have found a unique object that appears to be made of material from the time of Earth’s formation, which has been preserved in the Oort Cloud for billions of years. C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS) is the first object to be discovered on a long-period cometary orbit that has the characteristics of a pristine inner solar system asteroid.
© 2019 Pole Star Publications Limited