Week in images: 18-22 April 2022

Discover our week through the lens

Cambridge MA (SPX) Apr 21, 2022
In some of the most crowded parts of the universe, black holes may be tearing apart thousands of stars and using their remains to pack on weight. This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, could help answer key questions about an elusive class of black holes. While astronomers have previously found many examples of black holes tearing stars apart, little evidence has been

Leiden, Netherlands (SPX) Apr 22, 2022
Mercury harbors water ice in the shadows of the steepest craters around its poles. But it is unclear how those water molecules ended up on Mercury. Now a new simulation shows that incoming minor bodies such as asteroids, comets and dust particles carry enough water to account for all the ice sheets present. The study could form the basis for new research on water in exoplanetary systems. Publica

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Apr 22, 2022
Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, has announced that Planet's PlanetScope and SkySat data have joined the European Space Agency (ESA) Third Party Missions portfolio, enabling ESA to utilize Planet data for scientific, research, and pre-operational Earth Observation based applications development. Through distribution under the ESA Earthnet Pro

Westminster CO (SPX) Apr 22, 2022
Maxar Technologies (NYSE:MAXR) has announced a strategic investment in Blackshark.ai, a leading provider of AI-powered geospatial analytics services. The partnership represents Maxar's commitment to innovation within its 3D Earth Intelligence product portfolio. The Blackshark.ai platform processes petabytes of satellite imagery in hours, and it detects and segments objects, roads, vegetati

Beijing (XNA) Apr 21, 2022
China's cargo spacecraft Tianzhou-3 separated from the country's space station core module Tianhe and redocked with the module on Wednesday. Tianzhou-3 detached from the rear docking port of Tianhe at 5:02 a.m. (Beijing Time), moved to the module's front port and completed a computer-orchestrated rendezvous and docking at 9:06 a.m., according to the China Manned Space Agency. It also

Washington DC (UPI) Apr 21, 2021
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Thursday, carrying another 53 Starlink Internet satellites into space. The rocket lifted off at 1:51 p.m. from Launch Complex 40 after a 3-hour delay due to strong winds. It was the 43rd launch related to the Starlink project. SpaceX said the first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket landed o

London, Canada (SPX) Apr 22, 2022
A bright fireball was observed by a network of all-sky cameras across southern Ontario at 11:37pm on Sunday, April 17, 2022. Analysis of the video data suggests that fragments of the meteor are likely to have made it to the ground near the eastern shore of Lake Simcoe, just north of the town of Argyle. Western University's physics and astronomy department runs an all-sky camera network tha

Paris (ESA) Apr 22, 2022
The test version of a unique satellite navigation receiver has been delivered for integration testing on the Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft. The NaviMoon satnav receiver is designed to perform the farthest ever positioning fix from Earth, employing signals that will be millions of times fainter than those used by our smartphones or cars. "This engineering model of our NaviMoon receiver is the

Redmond WA (SPX) Apr 22, 2022
Kymeta and OneWeb Technologies announced an agreement to distribute reliable, secure, and cost-effective broadband connectivity services to the U.S. government. The new managed satellite service offering enables Kymeta to provide government customers with hardware solutions that are packaged with secure and resilient network access from OneWeb Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of low