First-Ever Photo of a Supermassive Black Hole Truly a quantum leap, astronomers have “seen the unseeable” and captured an image of a supermassive black hole—a “smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity,” Dennis Overbye writes for the New York Times. A planet-sized network of eight radio telescopes—called the Event Horizon Telescope—peered through interstellar dust and gas to reveal the black hole, located in a …
Autonomous technology has come for the final frontier. The European Space Agency’s new self-driving spacecraft could potentially protect our planet from catastrophic impacts with asteroids. The project, dubbed Hera, is in the process of getting outfitted with autonomous tech that, when installed, will enable the craft to use sensors to read nearby debris and objects to determine what (if anything) is an inbound target. The …
At the Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Space Resources, a new class called Space Resources Fundamentals is underway, the first-ever academic program specializing in space mining. Christopher Dreyer teaches the course, which is presently in a test run, though potentially slated again for summer 2018. The class covers things like the Outer Space Treaty, which was developed by the United Nations to govern outer-space …
