Mars is now creeping towards opposition in October, the point in its orbit when it's closest to Earth, so as big and bright as it gets. It's already getting visibly bigger and brighter with every passing night.
Mars is rising earlier each evening, and this weekend is now in the sky before midnight, with a 65% illuminated waning gibbous Moon in tow.
Stargazers call this event—when two celestial bodies appear to pass close to each other—a conjunction .
Were you following this:
NASA Scientists Leverage Carbon-Measuring Instrument for Mars Studies | NASA
SpaceX's Starship SN5 prototype soars on 1st test flight!
SpaceX just flew a full-size prototype of its Starship Mars-colonizing spacecraft for the first time ever.
The Starship SN5 test vehicle took to the skies for about 40 seconds this afternoon (Aug. 4) at SpaceX's facilities near the South Texas village of Boca Chica, performing a small hop that could end up being a big step toward human exploration of the Red Planet.
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The stainless-steel SN5 rose into the air at 7:57 p.m. EDT (2357 GMT; 6:57 p.m. local Texas time). It traveled sideways a bit during the brief, uncrewed flight, which Musk had previously said would target a maximum altitude of about 500 feet (150 meters). The spacecraft deployed its landing legs as planned and stuck the landing.
Photos: Atlas 5 rocket catapults into space with Mars rover – Spaceflight Now
Carrying a $2.7 billion NASA mission to Mars, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket took off July 30 from Cape Canaveral and fired into a summer sky powered by four powerful solid rocket boosters and a kerosene-burning main engine.
The Atlas 5 blasted off from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT) July 30 and rocketed away from the Florida spaceport with some 2.3 million pounds of thrust.
The 197-foot-tall (60-meter) rocket arced over the Atlantic Ocean to the east from Cape Canaveral, surpassed the speed of sound in 35 seconds, and shed its four strap-on solid rocket boosters just before the two-minute mark of the flight. The first stage’s kerosene-fed RD-180 fired for nearly four-and-a-half minutes dropping away, allowing the rocket’s Centaur upper stage to accelerate NASA’s Perseverance rover on an escape trajectory toward Mars.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Weather satellite and robotic telescope spot Perseverance rover en route to Mars | Space
When NASA's powerful Perseverance rover lifted off into space on July 30, a satellite and a robotic telescope caught unique views of the mission on its way to Mars.
Weather satellite GOES-16 , which usually monitors terrestrial and space weather from geosynchronous orbit, spotted the smoke plume of the launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Video from the event indicated the plume showed up easily in visible wavelengths, despite clouds around the site, and the launch appeared as a red streak on the satellite's "water vapor" channel.
Researchers use InSight for deep Mars measurements: Analysis of NASA lander seismograph data
Using data from NASA's InSight Lander on Mars, Rice University seismologists have made the first direct measurements of three subsurface boundaries from the crust to the core of the red planet.
"Ultimately it may help us understand planetary formation," said Alan Levander, co-author of a study available online this week in Geophysical Research Letters . While the thickness of Mars' crust and the depth of its core have been calculated with a number of models, Levander said the InSight data allowed for the first direct measurements, which can be used to check models and ultimately to improve them.
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