Month: February 2024

Enlarge / NASA's PACE spacecraft last year at Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. (credit: NASA)

NASA's latest mission dedicated to observing Earth's oceans and atmosphere from space rocketed into orbit from Florida early Thursday on a SpaceX launch vehicle.

This mission will study phytoplankton, microscopic plants fundamental to the marine food chain, and tiny particles called aerosols that play a key role in cloud formation. These two constituents in the ocean and the atmosphere are important to scientists' understanding of climate change. The mission's acronym, PACE, stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem.

Nestled in the nose cone of a Falcon 9 rocket, the PACE satellite took off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 1:33 am EST (06:33 UTC) Thursday after a two-day delay caused by poor weather.

Enlarge / NGC 2170. (credit: Mel Martin)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's February 8, and today's photo comes from the skies over Arizona.

This is an image of NGC 2170, the reddish nebula in the center of the frame. It is a large area of cosmic dust that is reflecting the light of bright, nearby stars. There are other nebulae and bright stars in this image, all of which combine to give this image its colorful appearance.