NASA’s “Tess” is Searching for Alien Worlds

NASA’s Tess (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) is going in search of some 200,000 of the brightest stars, in an attempt to find alien worlds. The satellite will hitch a ride with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and then spend two years floating around space, not just to observe but ultimately to find exoplanets (potentially habitable planets). Tess will be “flung into a highly elliptical orbit around Earth …

Supersonic Travel May Return by 2023

The last Concorde may have completed travel in 2003 but that doesn’t mean supersonic travel came to an end entirely. Three aviation start-ups are hoping to bring Mach speed back by 2023—and plan to tackle the faults of the previous airplane. First, not all companies are planning to reach Mach 2 (as the Concorde did) but max out at Mach 1.1 to 1.8. Further, they’ll …

Track All Things Orbiting Earth Daily

The brainchild of James Yoder, a future Electrical and Computer Engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, the website stuffin.space offers a realtime 3D map of Earth as seen from outer space—and it includes tracking visualizations for everything in orbit, refreshing daily. Yoder takes orbit data from Space-Track.org and pairs it with the satellite.js Javascript library in order to ascertain satellite positions. The …