Washington (AFP) Mar 3, 2025
Elon Musk has been making headlines for mass layoffs and funding cuts at US federal agencies under his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. But on Monday, his towering Starship rocket will return to the spotlight with its next test flight. The world's biggest and most powerful launch vehicle is set for its eighth orbital mission, following a dramatic mid-air explosion over the Cari

Washington (AFP) Mar 2, 2025
A US company successfully landed its spacecraft on the Moon on Sunday, marking only the second private mission to achieve the milestone - and the first to do so upright. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 touched down at 3:34 am US Eastern Time (0834 GMT) near Mons Latreille, a volcanic formation in Mare Crisium on the Moon's northeastern near side. The mission control team in Aus

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Feb 28, 2025
South Australia's pioneering satellite, Kanyini, has successfully transmitted its first images from space, marking a major milestone for the mission. Launched aboard SpaceX's Transporter-11 mission last August, Kanyini has been orbiting Earth for 194 days. The satellite's operation is overseen by the mission control team at Inovor Technologies, headquartered in Adelaide's Lot Fourteen inno

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Feb 28, 2025
Maxar Space Systems, a leader in satellite manufacturing and space technology solutions, has delivered the first of 16 spacecraft buses to L3Harris Technologies [NYSE: LHX] in support of the Space Development Agency (SDA)'s Tranche 1 Tracking Layer program. The spacecraft bus, built on the Maxar 300 platform, was designed to advance the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). Manufact

Madrid, Spain (SPX) Feb 28, 2025
The Spanish Air and Space Force's Logistics Support Command (MALOG), through its Directorate-General of Procurement (DAD), has awarded GMV a contract to develop and implement a cutting-edge simulator for training personnel in orbital mechanics and space operations. As part of the agreement, GMV will also provide ongoing maintenance and user training services. Space operations have become i

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Mar 01, 2025
The crew of China's Shenzhou XIX mission has completed a pivotal in-orbit test of a pipeline inspection robot aboard the Tiangong space station, marking a major step forward in space station maintenance technology. To evaluate the robot's capabilities, astronauts constructed a simulated pipeline system with an assortment of straight, curved, and conical pipes of varying diameters. Within t

Fairbanks AK (SPX) Mar 01, 2025
A University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist is participating in a U.S. government effort to design a satellite and instruments capable of detecting space debris as small as 1 centimeter, less than one-half inch. Debris that small, which cannot currently be detected from the ground, can damage satellites and other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The idea is to outfit future satellites,

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Mar 01, 2025
A research team from Tokyo Metropolitan University has made significant progress in the ongoing search for dark matter. Utilizing advanced spectrographic technology and the Magellan Clay Telescope, they have established new constraints on the lifetime of dark matter through just four hours of infrared observations. Their results underscore the potential of cutting-edge spectroscopic techniques i

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 01, 2025
Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) are the most energetic particles known in the universe, with energies exceeding those attainable by human-made accelerators by more than a million times. Despite their discovery over six decades ago, the origin of these extreme particles has remained an open question in astrophysics. A groundbreaking theory by Glennys Farrar, a physicist at New York Un

Berkeley CA (SPX) Mar 01, 2025
A research team co-led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Columbia University, and Universidad Autonoma de Madrid has developed a new optical computing material from photon avalanching nanoparticles. The breakthrough - which the team published recently in the journal Nature Photonics - paves the way for fabricating optical memory and transistors on a nanometer size sc