Scott Kelly returned safely to Earth on Tuesday evening at approximately 11:26 p.m. after spending a record-breaking 340 days in space.
Produced by Sara Silverstein and Jessica Orwig
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Scott Kelly returned safely to Earth on Tuesday evening at approximately 11:26 p.m. after spending a record-breaking 340 days in space.
Produced by Sara Silverstein and Jessica Orwig
Follow BI Video: On Twitter
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Astronaut Scott Kelly, of NASA, and cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos landed safely in Kazakhstan on March 2, 2016.
Produced by Jacqui Frank
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Every day, the world's most advanced space laboratory zips around the Earth 16 times.
The International Space Station (ISS) is the size of a football field and weighs almost 1 million pounds.
Since it travels at 17,500 miles per hour, you can get spectacular views of the entire planet multiple times a day.
And, you can even watch it online. This livestream will show you what the astronauts see:
It's nighttime on the side of the Earth that's not facing the sun. That's where the station is if what you're seeing on the camera is darkness.
Remarkably, high school students helped design and operate the four high definition cameras aboard the ISS that allow you to see Earth.
If you go to the USTREAM site that hosts the live feed, you can also see a map tracing where the ISS is in the world and a social feed where people post comments about what they're seeing.
So anytime you want to feel like an astronaut aboard the ISS, just tune into the livestream. I bet Scott Kelly will turn it on when he misses his home of 340 days.
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NOW WATCH: Watch astronaut Scott Kelly’s epic journey back to Earth in 60 seconds
Jason Allemann of JK Brickworks built a Lego model of the earth, moon, and sun, whose rotations are surprisingly accurate.
Story and editing by Carl Mueller
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NASA is one of the few government agencies that tries to take transparency to heart.
The space agency even says so in its core mission: "We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind."
Aside from NASA's savvysocialmediafeeds, NASA TV is a great place to see what thousands of astronauts and scientists are doing and discovering all over the universe.
NASA TV broadcasts live spacecraft launches, experiments at the International Space Station, interviews with astronauts, and shows about the agency's planned missions.
It was where tens of thousands of people watched astronaut Scott Kelly return from 340 days in space.
And you can watch it too! Here's the livestream:
You can also watch NASA TV on the Android or iOS NASA App. The station regularly updates its full schedule and list of programs here.
Besides, wouldn't you rather tune in to the state of humanity's progress toward the stars than some reality TV fight between lovers? We hope so.
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NOW WATCH: Watch astronaut Scott Kelly’s epic journey back to Earth in 60 seconds
After nearly a year in space, astronaut Scott Kelly chats about his experiences and what he missed about Earth.
Produced by Maya Dangerfield. Video courtesy of NASA.
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The next big project for J.J. Abrams, the director of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", isn't another blockbuster film. It's a 9-part documentary web series about the teams competing for the Google Lunar XPrize, a $30 million competition to send an unmanned rover to the moon.
In order to win the prize, teams have to build a rover that can roam around the moon for 500 meters and take high-definition images and video to send back to Earth. They have until the mission deadline at the end of December 2017 to make it all come together.
16 teams — including a father and son in Vancouver and a group of IT specialists in India — are still in the running.
The series, called "Moon Shot," debuts on Google Play on March 15th and YouTube on March 17th. Check out the trailer below.
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Sally Ride made history as America's first woman in space on June 18, 1983.
And as PBS recently highlighted, she had to put up with some incredibly sexist questions and comments before and after her inaugural launch.
But that's just one piece of Ride's fascinating legacy: She also pushed NASA into reform after her death from pancreatic cancer in 2012.
Ride was reportedly a very private person and never made her sexuality public while she was alive. So the news that Ride was gay did not spread until after she passed away.
Her obituary stated that she was survived by Tam O'Shaughnessy, her "partner of 27 years."
The news electrified the space and science community, and revealed that Ride's decision to remain silent about her sexuality may not have been entirely her own.
A 2014 story in The American Prospect hinted at NASA's attitude toward the lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community around Ride's time there:
[C]oming out doesn't seem to have occurred to [Ride] and certainly would have jeopardized her chance to go to space if not killed it outright. Around 1990 — seven years after Ride’s historic flight — NASA management quietly ordered a working group of physicians to declare homosexuality a "psychiatrically disqualifying condition." (The rule didn't end up going through, and although no astronaut has ever come out, NASA says it doesn't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.)
Although an explicit rule against homosexuality never passed, it's telling that NASA tried. It's also notable that there has never been an openly LGBTQ astronaut — Ride is the first known, and we only learned about it after her death.
Some have pointed to the similarities between NASA and the military as an explanation for this unspoken intolerance. The American military operated under a "don't ask, don't tell policy" until 2011, where anyone in the military who was not heterosexual had to keep that information to himself or herself.
NASA borrowed heavily from the military corps when it first began recruiting astronauts. Over half of all NASA astronauts have served in the military, according to biographies on NASA's website.
Lynn Sherr, one of Ride's friends and her biographer, wrote a piece for Slate in 2014 that suggests Ride had the same idea about NASA:
With Sally in her final days, the two women started to plan a celebration of her life — an event for After that took their minds off Now. But Tam saw the disconnect, and asked Sally how she — Tam — should identify herself at the party. Sally considered the question and then said: "I want you to decide. Whatever you want to say, how much you want to say, is fine with me." Later she added, "Being open about us might be very hard on NASA and the astronaut corps. But I’m OK with that. Whatever you think is right is fine with me."
As the first woman in space, Ride already had to deal with a media frenzy and endure questions like "Would spaceflight affect a woman's reproductive organs?,""Did she plan on wearing a bra while in space?" and "How would menstruation in space work?" Being the first woman andsimultaneously the first openly gay woman in space, would have been a trial for anyone.
For its part, NASA now includes people who identify as LGBTQ in its nondiscrimination policy, and has a whole web page dedicated to its policies on homosexuality in the work place. It has also publicly supported the US Supreme Court ruling that made gay marriage legal in the US. And Ride's updated astronaut biography at NASA.gov now includes the detail about her long-term partner O'Shaughnessy.
"NASA is very supportive," Steve Riley, chairman of the Out & Allied Employee Resource Group at NASA's Johnson Space Center, told The Advocate in 2012 not long after Ride's death. "I’m sure, back in Sally's day, it was nowhere near that supportive."
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The Orion Multipurpose Crew Vehicle is how NASA plans on sending its astronauts back into space. But first it has to go through rigorous testing – which in this case means being surrounded by 1,500 speakers that will simulate the acoustics of an actual launch.
Produced by Matt Stuart. Video Courtesy NASA and AP.
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Astronaut Scott Kelly is back on American soil after an eventful year.
Kelly spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station before making it back to Earth on Tuesday. During his time up there, he grew plants, conducted experiences, took breathtaking pictures and... grew two inches taller.
In large part, Kelly's year in space was meant to see how our bodies handle that much time in microgravity. One of the things that can happen? Astronauts aboard the ISS grow up to 3% taller, likely because the spine has a chance to elongate with less pressure from gravity.
But, unfortunately for Kelly's newfound height, the effect is only temporary. Once he's back on Earth for a long enough time (still to be determined, but scientists estimate it can take few months), gravity will bring him back to his normal height.
In 2013, NASA launched a study that wanted to figure out what it was that caused astronauts to elongate by focusing on the spine. There are still some ongoing studies on the topic.
Now that he's back, Kelly will be studied by scientists to look for other changes that may have happened to his body while in space, including any changes to his vision, bones, and brain. Knowing what happens to the body when it's in microgravity for a long time will give researchers clues for how they should prepare astronauts for even longer missions (like a trip to Mars, for instance).
Watch Kelly arrive back to Houston, Texas:
Great to be back on #Earth. There's no place like #home! Taking the plunge after my #Houston arrival. #YearInSpacehttps://t.co/NhyLTbqcxS
— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) March 3, 2016
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NOW WATCH: Watch astronaut Scott Kelly’s epic journey back to Earth in 60 seconds
For the last decade, Russian-made engines have been propelling US national security satellites into space.
While this has proven to be a good approach in the past, the time has come for a new breed of rocket engine that's American-made.
On Feb. 29, the US Air Force — who runs the national security launch missions — announced that it will invest up to $738 million to put an end to America's reliance on the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines.
RD-180 engines currently power the Atlas V rocket, which is owned and run by the United Launch Alliance (ULA) aerospace company.
And over the last 10 years, the Atlas V has helped ferry expensive and sensitive national security payloads into space for the Air Force.
But in recent years, as political tensions grew between the US and Russia, ULA's use of the RD-180 engines has come under fire.
After the Crimean crisis in 2014, Congress called to permanently terminate the Air Force's reliance on Russian-made rocket engines by building a program that would see functional, American-made rocket engines by the end of 2019.
As part of its announcement on Feb. 29, the Air Force said it will award ULA up to $202 million, which will go toward the construction of ULA's new Vulcan rocket — scheduled to launch for the first time in 2019.
Vulcan is expected to run on rocket engines designed and constructed by the American aerospace company Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
But Blue Origin isn't the only company working on taking back America's role as a leader in rocket propulsion systems.
In direct competition is the rocket propulsion manufacturer company Aerojet Rocketdyne, which just got a major vote of confidence.
The rest of that $738 million the Air Force is willing to invest — which equates to a whopping $536 million — was dedicated to Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Right now, Aerojet is constructing its AR1 rocket engine, which the company says could be used to propel the Atlas V, Vulcan, as well as other rockets currently under development.
While ULA has contracted with Blue Origin to build its BE-4 rocket engines for the Vulcan rocket, ULA also has a contract with Aerojet, as back up.
If Blue Origin's efforts to build the BE-4 rocket engine falter, then ULA will turn to Aerojet's AR1 to power the Vulcan.
ULA and Aerojet have until Dec. 31, 2019 to design, build, and test its new engines.
“While the RD-180 engine has been a remarkable success with more than 60 successful launches, we believe now is the right time for American investment in a domestic engine,” Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and chief executive officer, said in a release.
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The Hubble Space Telescope has seen some s--t, and broken quite a few records in the process. It just broke another — scientists at NASA and ESA used Hubble to measure the distance of the farthest galaxy ever observed.
The name of the galaxy: GN-z11. The distance: 13.4 billion light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major.
That means the galaxy came into existence just 400 million years after the Big Bang — we're looking at something 3% of its current age. It's the oldest celestial object ever measured, beating out the 13.2-billion-light-year-away EGSY8p7 galaxy.
"We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble," Yale astronomer Pascal Oesch, the principal investigator of the new findings, said in a news release.
The results will be published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal.
The researchers describe GN-z11 as 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and possessing just 1 percent of the latter's mass in stars. Yet, given its size, it's an unusually bright galaxy that continues to grow 20 times faster than the Milky Way.
"It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses (one solar mass is equal to the mass of the Sun) so soon," said UC Santa Cruz astronomer and study co-author Garth Illingworth.
Turning 26 this year, Hubble has been one of the most valuable space instruments ever built and launched, greatly surpassing initial expectations.
The 13.4 billion light-year cosmic distance record is likely to stand until the launch of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope in 2018.
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NOW WATCH: Stunning new photos of the Milky Way give us the most detailed look of our galaxy yet
Back in February, NASA announced that an asteroid was going to shoot across the sky on March 5 — and that it'd come close enough to actually see through a backyard telescope.
However, the space agency just revised its calculations. It now expects the rogue space rock to swing by a few days later on March 8 and, to the disappointment of avid skywatchers, it probably won't come close enough to see.
More importantly: No, it's not going to hit us, but there's a chance it could come tantalizingly close to faking us out.
The rock in question is asteroid 2013 TX68, which swooped within 1.3 million miles of our home planet two years ago. It's coming back again in its orbit around the sun, and this time it might come much, much closer to Earth.
How close? That's hard to say, since astronomers had a limited time to track the rock after its discovery in October 2013.
Previous calculations suggested it would swing as close as 11,000 miles from Earth or as far as 9 million miles away. But more recent number-crunching suggests it will likely pass within about 3 million miles of Earth.
NASA says"there is no possibility" it will impact Earth this time, though there's a slim chance it could come within 15,000 miles from our planet — 16 times closer than the moon is to the earth, and 50% closer than many communications satellites.
But again, the odds are stacked against the closer pass.
"Prospects for observing this asteroid, which were not very good to begin with, are now even worse because the asteroid is likely to be farther away, and therefore dimmer than previously believed," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies said in a press release.
Here is the asteroid's updated trajectory:
Asteroid 2013 TX68 measures about 100 feet in diameter, or roughly the size of an airplane, and it's slated to pay us another visit next year on September 28, 2017.
NASA previously said that there is a small chance that it could hit us at that time (about 1 in 250 million — the same odds of being killed by a falling coconut). Yet their new calculations say that it "cannot impact Earth" in the next 100 years.
One more thing: Though this asteroid no longer seems to pose a threat to humanity, there are many nefarious objects lurking out there that could level a city or worse. And, as of right now, we have little chance of detecting a smaller yet dangerous near-earth object (NEO) until it's too late.
The problem is so dire NASA recently opened a new office to help coordinate efforts to protect the Earth.
If you're curious about the stats on all of the NEO flybys we do know about, check out NASA's Near Earth Object Program page here.
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NASA welcomed Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko home to Earth on March 1 after their "One-Year Mission" in space.
But they weren't up there a full year. They were on the International Space Station (ISS) for 340 days.
The question many of us are probably thinking is: Can't NASA count? Why not make it a full 365 days?
Well, it turns out that it has more to do with rockets than calendars.
In a Reddit AMA question-and-answer session about the "one-year mission" with NASA scientists, RKO36 asked: "I can't [get] past the fact the year in space was only 0.93 years and not 1 year. Why?"
The scientists responded:
It is determined by Soyuz launch schedules. 11 months in space is close to 12 months and much longer than the usual 6 month rotations on ISS. So calling it the one-year mission (abbreviated 1YM) is just a convenience. (Close enough, right?)
The Russian space agency Roscosmos sets the Soyuz space capsule launch schedules, so they're the ones who decide when astronauts get to go to and leave the ISS.
But the Russians had cosmonaut Kornienko up there for a year, too, so I don't understand why Roscosmos didn't just decide to set the Soyuz landing for March 16 to make it the full 365 days.
As the NASA scientists said, perhaps 340 days is "close enough."
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NOW WATCH: Watch astronaut Scott Kelly’s epic journey back to Earth in 60 seconds
Astronomers have detected repeating blasts of radio signals coming from deep space.
These short-lived signals are known as 'fast radio bursts' (FRBs), and although we've heard them before, they were always thought to be one-off events coming from random locations.
But for the first time ever, researchers have now heard repeating signals, all emanating from a single unknown source outside our galaxy.
Ten blasts all coming from the same direction were detected last year in May and June — and when the astronomers looked back at the data, they found that another FRB in 2012 had originated from the same place, suggesting that something is happening there regularly to produce the extremely short and intense signals.
We know what you're thinking right now (and we don't blame you), but let's be clear up-front that there are a whole lot of possible explanations for these strange bursts outside of aliens.
Ever since FRBs were first discovered back in 2007, astronomers have been unsuccessfully searching for any sign of them coming from the same spot twice — something that would help them figure out what the hell was causing them.
But last November, Paul Scholz from McGill University in Canada was going through months of old data collected by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and spotted some unusual patterns — six FRBs arriving within just 10 minutes of each other, and four more spread out, all coming from the same place.
"I knew immediately that the discovery would be extremely important in the study of FRBs,"he said.
Researchers don't have enough data to pinpoint exactly where the bursts are coming from, but the team is pretty sure they're from outside our galaxy, based on the amount of plasma they dispersed while getting here. That's a pretty complicated measurement, but basically the 10 newly detected FRBs, as well as the 2012 burst, all had three times the maximum dispersion measure that you'd expect from a source within the Milky Way.
That point of origin in itself makes the repeating radio bursts unique — the other 16 FRBs we've found all appear to come from within our galaxy - but the differences don't stop there. "Not only did these bursts repeat, but their brightness and spectra also differ from those of other FRBs,"said one of the researchers, Laura Spitler, from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.
This has led the researchers to suggest that the repeating bursts might actually be a whole new type of FRB that we've never seen before.
The timing of the discovery is somewhat coincidental, because just last week, we thought we were finally getting close to understanding FRBs once and for all.
Scientists had managed to pinpoint the exact location of one of the bursts for the first time - something that's now been called into question - and based on the age of the galaxy it came from, they suggested that the burst wasn't coming from early star activity and was instead from an explosive event - such as the collision of two neutron stars - which couldn't possibly be repeated.
But this discovery suggests that the opposite is true. In fact, that most likely explanation for the repeating FRBs is that they come from an exotic object such as a young neutron star rotating with enough power to regular emit the extremely bright pulses. These stars might not even belong to a galaxy, the researchers suggest.
The next step is to pinpoint exactly where these mysterious signals are coming from so that astronomers can get a better idea of the type of activity that's happening there.
"Once we have precisely localised the repeater's position on the sky, we will be able to compare observations from optical and X-ray telescopes and see if there is a galaxy there,"said researcher Jason Hessels from the University of Amsterdam. "Finding the host galaxy of this source is critical to understanding its properties."
Of course, just because these repeating radio bursts appear to have a different origin to the one-offs doesn't mean that the hypothesis put forward last week is wrong - it just means that we now have a brand new class of FRBs, most likely with their own origin story, to figure out. And it's always a good day in science when we can get a new mystery to unravel. We can't wait to find out more.
The research has been published in Nature.
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NOW WATCH: Here's a 3-minute animation that will completely change the way you see the universe
There are two types of aliens that humans could detect within the next century:
NASA, along with other space agencies around the world, are making impressive strides toward uncovering the first one — life within our solar system. But until now, the prospects of finding intelligent ET have been low.
Two astrophysicists have recently developed a radical new approach in the search for intelligent alien life, and they say it could help us discover signals from an advanced alien race – if any exist — within the next 70 years.
Instead of looking at how humans might detect extraterrestrials, the researchers studied how extraterrestrials might discover us.
It's possible that aliens might already know Earth exists, contains life, and they're attempting to contact us right now.
The big question, then, is how would they find us?
Admittedly, it's impossible to know what potential alien scientists are thinking, but when it comes to the search for distant planets, the options are limited by the geometry of space. Therefore, it's not ridiculous to imagine that aliens might discover Earth using the same techniques that astronomers use here on Earth.
With that in mind, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research astrophysicist René Heller and McMaster University astrophysicist Ralph Pudritz mapped out a narrow band in the night sky of the most likely places we could receive signals from intelligent aliens.
The main method astronomers use to look for exoplanets is to measure the brightness of distant stars.
Exoplanets alone are small and dim, but they make themselves known by passing in front of a star.
When that happens, the planet blocks out some of the light and the overall brightness decreases, which astronomers then measure to determine the planet's size, as shown in the animation below:
While this is an effective planet-hunting approach, it can only detect a plant as long as the star and exoplanet are along Earth's line of sight.
As a result, while there may be thousands of exoplanets out there, we may never observe or study many of them.
And although that's somewhat depressing, Heller and Pudritz realized that this same limitation applies to any extraterrestrials out there who might be using the same technique.
Going from that notion, they reversed the scenario that we use to hunt for aliens and instead plotted where in the sky distant observers could witness Earth passing in front of our Sun.
It turns out that it's a relatively small area (labeled in the diagram above as "Earth's Transit Zone), about two thousandths the size of the entire sky. That already narrows the search quite a bit, but Heller and Pudrtiz went one step farther.
They looked at all of the stars within that area similar to our Sun — since some think the best chances for the evolution of intelligent life is around Sun-like stars. They found 82 stars, which can now serve as a useful catalogue for SETI initiatives.
"The key point of this strategy is that it confines the search area to a very small part of the sky," Heller said in a press release. "As a consequence, it might take us less than a human life span [about 70 years] to find out whether or not there are extraterrestrial astronomers who have found the Earth."
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Astronomers have discovered rare, scorching-hot stars busting to life within a giant, red gas cloud called RCW 106.
Produced by Jacqui Frank. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig.
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SpaceX is at it again.
After boats, high winds, and fuel issues led the company to scrub four launches in the past nine days, SpaceX is ready to try a fifth attempt at firing one of its upgraded Falcon 9 rockets into space.
The launch is scheduled to take place on Friday evening out of SpaceX's launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The launch window opens at 6:35 p.m. EST and ends at 8:06 p.m.
SpaceX's main mission is to ferry the Boeing-built SES-9 communications satellite to about 22,000 miles above sea level.
Weighing in at approximately 11,750 pounds, the SES-9 satellite will be the largest payload yet that SpaceX has launched to such great heights.
Consequently, this will be one of SpaceX's most difficult missions to date.
While the main mission is what SpaceX is getting paid for, it's the secondary goal that makes this launch so special.
The company will attempt to retrieve the first stage of its rocket after launch by landing it on an ocean platform floating about 400 miles off Florida's coast.
Because this mission is particularly strenuous on the Falcon 9, SpaceX said that it has low hopes for a successful rocket landing.
But if somehow the rocket succeeds, it will be the second time in history that SpaceX will have landed one of its rockets and the first time a landing will have occurred on its ocean platform.
Live coverage of the event will take place shortly before 6:35 p.m. EST, and you can watch it on YouTube or below. Read on for a complete breakdown of what's scheduled to take place with the rocket after liftoff.
Here's a schedule of the sequence of events after takeoff, courtesy of SpaceX:
After the first and second stages separate at 2 minutes 40 seconds after liftoff, the first stage will begin its way back to Earth for an attempted landing.
SEE ALSO: 'Sledgehammer' winds have led SpaceX to reschedule its launch for Friday
Success! SpaceX completed its second mission of the year, which was also one of its most difficult to date.
And we have to say that it's about time. After four scrubs, two of which were down to the last minutes, SpaceX has kept us in launch limbo for the last nine days.
But on Friday evening, our patience was rewarded. At exactly 6:35 p.m. ET, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off toward space carrying with it the 17,500-pound SES-9 communications satellite:
SpaceX's goal was to transport the SES-9 satellite into orbit about 25,000 miles above sea level. Obviously, that takes some time for the rocket to reach such great heights.
About 32 minutes after lift-off, the crowd at SpaceX cheered as the rocket's second stage successfully deployed its payload into space, which you can see taking place below. This marked a successful end to SpaceX's mission.Weighing in at approximately 11,750 pounds, the SES-9 satellite will be the largest payload yet that SpaceX has launched to such great heights.
Consequently, this is also one of SpaceX's most difficult missions to date.
While the main mission was a success, SpaceX had a secondary goal to attempt to land the first stage of its rocket on board a floating ocean platform called "Of Course I Still Love You."
A successful landing is a critical step in SpaceX's future asprations to usher in an era of cheaper spaceflights run on reusable rockets.
This time around, SpaceX had low hopes of pulling off the landing, and their expectations were proven correct. The landing was unsuccessful. Click here for more details.
In the mean time, check out what the previous three ocean platform lading attempts looked like below:
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NOW WATCH: Watch never-before-seen footage of SpaceX's monumental rocket landing