• Cosmos

One Pretty Thing: The Northern Lights Visible In the Lower 48

• Aurora Borealis
• Northern Lights
• solar flares

This week presents a rare astronomical event: the northern lights will be visible to a large swathe of the United States. According to the latest forecast from the Space Weather Prediction Center, the Aurora Borealis can be spotted from the Pacific Northwest to New England and as far south as northern Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.

• Cosmos

NASA Partners with Europeans to Launch Ocean Observing Satellite

• climate change
• Earth Observation
• NASA
• ocean
• SpaceX

NASA launched a new ocean observation satellite on the back of a SpaceX rocket last week. Now that it’s in space, the Sentinel-6 named the “Michael Freilich” will perform continuous monitoring of ocean levels and currents for the next 30 years. The “unprecedented accuracy” of its data will benefit ocean travel, weather forecasts, hurricane predictions, and climate science.  

Why This Matters: The Sentinel-6 will help scientists monitor the climate crisis as it unfolds in our world’s oceans and coasts (home to 40% of humanity).

• Cosmos

One Cool Thing: Baby Yoda In Space

• Baby Yoda
• international space station
• Space X Dragon

Baby Yoda is the Crew-1 astronauts' zero gravity indicator pic.twitter.com/XEshbkl1VT — Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) November 16, 2020 The most famous member of the Space Shuttle crew is an alien TV star!  The new astronaut crew aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft safely docked with the International Space Station late Monday.  Way cool, but all anyone could […]

• Cosmos

One Looney Lunar Thing: Trump Plans Moon Colony

• #COVID19
• Dan Rather
• GOP
• Infrastructure
• internet
• Mars
• moon

In a tweet last Friday, the Republican Party boasted about President Trump’s agenda “fighting for you” in his second term, which included establishing a permanent human presence on the moon, sending astronauts to visit Mars, infrastructure, and high-speed internet nationwide (in that order).  As if these things were remotely comparable!  And maybe they should consider […]

• Cosmos

One Cool Thing: NASA Spacecraft Fetches A Rock From Nearby Asteroid

• asteroid
• Bennu
• NASA
• solar system

NASA announced that its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully touched down on the near-Earth asteroid Bennu after spending two years orbiting it.  Its task was to grab a sample from the asteroid’s surface with its robotic arm.  Bennu sits 200 million miles from Earth (so close) and NASA’s leadership was thrilled with this latest “first” — the […]

• Cosmos

One Cool Thing: Fireflies in Space

• education
• fireflies
• Jeff Bezos
• STEM

When a second-grade class wondered what would happen if a firefly went to space (would it still be able to light up in zero gravity?) their teacher, Maggie Samudio, helped them get the answer by helping her students send an experiment to space. As the New York Times reported, Blue Origin, the rocket company started […]