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John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, has died at 95. His legacy equally a combat pilot, spaceman, senator, and loving family man will succeed him, along with the John Glenn Research Centre in Cleveland. Godspeed, John Glenn.

SpaceX just lost a major contract every bit an afterwards-result of its launch problems. Setbacks in scheduling because of their October launchpad explosion and subsequent investigation have toll SpaceX their launch contract for an S-band satellite by Inmarsat, a British satellite company. Inmarsat does still intend to launch some other satellite, the Inmarsat-5 F4, with SpaceX come up 2017. For this twelvemonth, though, Inmarsat'south schedule wouldn't wait.

Virgin Galactic is making a comeback from ending, with a cautious return to manned flight on board its VSS Unity. They had a airplane pilot, Michael Alsbury, killed when the VSS Enterprise crashed into the Mojave, then everyone'due south been triple-checking everything. Saturday was the first manned glide test for the VSS Unity, and everything seems to take gone well.

Researchers from Australia have developed an optical chip for upgrading the telescopes nosotros use to find exoplanets, and the scrap works a bit like noise-canceling headphones. To cancel out unwanted racket, active racket canceling applies acoustic interference. This optical flake characterizes the glow from an exoplanet's parent star, and then exactly cancels it out, letting u.s.a. better paradigm the exoplanets themselves. "This chip is an [optical] interferometer that adds equal but opposite light waves from a host sun which cancels out the light from the sun, allowing the much weaker planet light to be seen," said senior writer Dr. Steve Madden.

Electric-bluish ice clouds seeded by falling star dust have been spied over Antarctica by a NASA satellite. Why are they such a crazy colour? Aliens. They're lit from backside and beneath by the eerie glow of the midnight sunday.

NASA also released a video look inside their flying telescope, SOFIA. SOFIA stands for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. It's a telescope mounted on a plane, because a plane can get it above the obscuring water vapor in Earth's temper, and that's cheaper than launching a telescope into space. NASA uses SOFIA for astronomy, simply also for education and outreach. The plane is a super-long-booty 747 widebody, capable of flying on all-dark observation flights to go wherever the right identify is to observe whatever NASA wants to look at.

Also, NASA launched a new giphy page and accompanying Pinterest lath, full of gorgeous and informative images. Among many others, they included several pics of what will happen when the Milky Mode and Andromeda collide, some five billion years hence. They as well uploaded construction shots from the James Webb Space Telescope, a bunch of solar science images, and even some pics of the hexagonal rings around Saturn's poles. Become have a look!