Parker Probe: Close to touching the sun on Christmas Eve

The probe has incrementally approached the sun by utilizing gravitational assists from Venus to accelerate. (Image: NASA, JPL, Horizons system)

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is on a daring mission to get closer to the sun than ever before. On Christmas Eve at 6:53 a.m. ET, it will break its own record for the nearest approach to the sun at 6.1 million kilometres (3.8 million miles). It will also be the fastest human-made object ever, reaching a scorching speed of 430,000 mph (700,000 km/h).

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Unidentified sonar-like sound heard through Starliner's speakers

Photo: NASA

As Starliner is prepping to undock from the International Space Station and return to Earth uncrewed in a matter of days, a new mystery surfaces and leaves the crew baffled. On Saturday, astronaut Butch Wilmore alerted NASA's Mission Control about an unexplained "strange noise" heard from a speaker in the spacecraft.

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Safety first: NASA changes return plan for Starliner astronauts

Photo; NASA/Robert Markowitz

NASA has decided astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will come home in February 2025 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon from the International Space Station (ISS) due to concerns about the performance of the Boeing's Starliner spacecraft they were on. The agency will send them home on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission, which is scheduled to launch to the ISS in late September.

By the time Wilmore and Williams depart, they will have spent about eight months on the space station. The Starliner flight test was only scheduled to last a little over a week.

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This is what it looks like to watch ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ in space

We shared news a couple of weeks back about how the astronauts on the International Space Station are going to get to watch Star Wars: The Last Jedi. And it seems that time has come. NASA astronaut Mark T. Vande Hei just tweeted a photo of the space station crew sitting around a projector screen with drink bags and “bungee cord chairs” for movie night. There’s something endearing about the shot showing adults holding on to their drink bags and watching an iconic science fiction film. Word is out yet whether the real life astronauts enjoyed the movie.

Space Station movie night, complete with “bungee cord chairs”, drink bags, and a science fiction flick! pic.twitter.com/IPZ2thI8rw

— Mark T. Vande Hei (@Astro_Sabot) December 24, 2017