Space news
- Happy Land
- Aug 27, 2022
- 1 min read
SpaceX's Mechazilla crane places the first stage of SpaceX's Starship rocket with its 33 Raptor engines onto the launch pad
It's been a year since we and a whole world of people have been waiting for the first orbital flight of the most powerful rocket in history... and at the end of this process are manned flights to Mars.
Webb ushers in a new era of exoplanet science with the first unequivocal detection of carbon dioxide in a planetary atmosphere outside our solar system.
After years of preparation and anticipation, exoplanet researchers are ecstatic. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured an astonishingly detailed rainbow of near-infrared starlight filtered through the atmosphere of a hot gas giant 700 light-years away. The transmission spectrum of exoplanet WASP-39 b, based on a single set of measurements made using Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph and analyzed by dozens of scientists, represents a hat trick of firsts: Webb’s first official scientific observation of an exoplanet; the first detailed exoplanet spectrum covering this range of near-infrared colors; and the first indisputable evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star. The results are indicative of Webb’s ability to spot key molecules like carbon dioxide in a wide variety of exoplanets – including smaller, cooler, rocky planets – providing insights into the composition, formation, and evolution of planets across the galaxy.
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