Weekly space news - 9/Oct/22

5 points in 5 minutes

Massive solar flare causes blackouts on the Earth

This week on Monday a massive class x1 Solar flare on the sun shook the Earth and caused blackouts over vast areas of the planets. GPS and Radio signals were disrupted. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory says that there are still more flares to come. Luckily they are monitoring the sun to record any incoming danger.

ISRO’s Mars orbiter mission goes offline

8 years ago India became the fourth country in the world to launch a spacecraft into the orbit of Mars with its Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM). This week ISRO reported that the mission had gone offline. The MOM lasted much longer than it was originally planned for 6 to 10 months.

Emanuele Riva the new pesident of the IAF

This week Emanuele Riva was elected the new president of the International Astronautical Federation. A K Anil Kumar of ISRO was elected the vice president.

SpaceX launches to the ISS with a unique crew

This week SpaceX launched another one of its dragon capsules to the ISS with a special crew. Some members of this ‘special’ crew are Mann the first Native American woman to reach the final frontier. Another member is Kikina the first Russian to fly on a private American spacecraft.

Astronomers find a special ‘Cataclysmic’ pair of stars.

Astronomers at MIT found a pair of stars orbiting each other this week. The special part about this discovery is that the two stars are orbiting each other so closely that it only takes 51 minutes for one to finish orbiting the other. Try comparing that to the Earth revolving around the sun every 365 days.