Washington DC (UPI) Dec 4, 2025
The United States has entered a consequential new era of competition with China in space - one that lawmakers said will shape global power, economic security and military advantage for generations. House Science, Space and Technology Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Chairman Mike Haridopolos, R-Fla., posed the issue during a hearing Thursday as a question for the future. "Will huma

Paris (AFP) Dec 3, 2025
Light from the half a million satellites that humanity is planning to launch into Earth's orbit in the coming years could contaminate almost all the images taken by space telescopes, NASA astronomers warned Wednesday. Scientists have already been sounding the alarm about how light pollution from increasingly massive satellites threaten the future of dark skies seen from the ground. Now,

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Dec 04, 2025
DLR and ESA are recruiting volunteers for two human research campaigns at the :envihab aerospace medicine facility in Cologne that will simulate key aspects of long duration missions beyond low Earth orbit. The SOLIS100 isolation study will place six participants in a confined, spacecraft like habitat for 100 days, while the SMC3 bed rest study will keep 12 volunteers in head down tilt for 60 da

Paris, France (SPX) Dec 04, 2025
ESA's Mars Express orbiter has observed an impact crater in Mars's northern lowlands whose shape resembles a butterfly, created when an incoming space rock struck the surface at a shallow angle. The main crater, which appears somewhat like a walnut from orbit, measures about 20 km east to west and 15 km north to south and sits within the Idaeus Fossae region. The impact threw material preferenti

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 04, 2025
SwRI scientists report that a reanalysis of Voyager 2 measurements suggests a powerful solar storm may explain why Uranus hosts an electron radiation belt far more intense than expected. They propose that a large-scale solar wind structure, known as a co-rotating interaction region, was passing through the Uranian system during the 1986 flyby, driving extreme space weather conditions that booste

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Dec 04, 2025
An international collaboration led by the University of Oxford has identified one of the largest rotating structures observed so far, a thin string of hydrogen-rich galaxies embedded in a spinning cosmic filament around 140 million light-years away. The work, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, offers new constraints on how large-scale structures influence the formati