Following a design competition, ESA has selected the industrial team that will design and build the first experimental payload to extract oxygen from the surface of the Moon. The winning consortium, led by Thales Alenia Space in the UK, has been tasked with producing a small piece of equipment that will evaluate the prospect of building larger lunar plants to extract propellant for spacecraft and breathable air for astronauts – as well as metallic raw materials for equipment.

Poole UK (SPX) Mar 07, 2022
It had long been thought that the famous site of Stonehenge served as an ancient calendar, given its alignment with the solstices. Now, research has identified how it may have worked. New finds about the stone circle's history, along with analysis of other ancient calendar systems, prompted Professor Timothy Darvill to take a fresh look at Stonehenge. His analysis, published in the journal

Beijing (XNA) Mar 09, 2022
China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp, a major defense contractor, plans to launch a technology demonstration satellite in the coming months, according to a senior researcher overseeing the project. "The Tiankun 2 satellite is undergoing final tests by our engineers and will be launched by a Long March rocket," said Ma Jie, Party chief of the CASIC Second Academy in Beijing, which is d

Potsdam, Germany (SPX) Mar 08, 2022
The Amazon rainforest is likely losing resilience, data analysis from high-resolution satellite images suggests. This is due to stress from a combination of logging and burning - the influence of human-caused climate change is not clearly determinable so far, but will likely matter greatly in the future. For about three quarters of the forest, the ability to recover from perturbation has b

Sendai, Japan (SPX) Mar 09, 2022
ElevationSpace Inc. (Headquartered: Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, Co-Founder and CEO: Ryohei Kobayashi), a space startup company that originated at Tohoku University in Japan and develops a space environment utilization and recovery platform to replace the International Space Station (ISS), has raised seed funding of $2.7 million from six investors. Adding pre-seed funding, the total amount

Friedrichshafen, Germany (SPX) Mar 09, 2022
Airbus has successfully completed the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) for its system concept for the second generation Galileo navigation satellites. During this important milestone, Airbus' proposed preliminary design and the customer's system requirements have been fully reviewed and agreed. This paves the way for further verification, acceptance and qualification at equipment and module

Munich, Germany (SPX) Mar 09, 2022
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands have for the first time detected dimethyl ether in a planet-forming disc. With nine atoms, this is the largest molecule identified in such a disc to date. It is also a precursor of larger organic molecules that can lead to the emergence of life. "From these results,

Trieste, Italy (SPX) Mar 07, 2022
A huge amount of mysterious dark energy is necessary to explain cosmological phenomena, such as the accelerated expansion of the Universe, with Einstein's theory. But what if dark energy was just an illusion and general relativity itself had to be modified? A new SISSA study, published in Physical Review Letters, offers a new approach to answer this question. Thanks to huge computational a

Washington DC (SPX) Mar 09, 2022
Future tokamak fusion power reactors will generate heat beyond what current materials can withstand. Scientists have proposed various methods for cooling the edge of the magnetically confined fusion fuel, or plasma, to protect the walls of the surrounding tokamak. One approach is injecting impurities in the form of gases to help radiate away excess heat. However, there is a limited range of gase

by Molly Porter for MSFC News
Huntsville AL (SPX) Mar 09, 2022 Right now, some 182 million miles separate the red clay of Alabama from the dusty red planet Mars. But groundbreaking flight hardware developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will soon close that distance. The new hardware is an integral component of the Mars Sample Return campaign, a historic endeavor that will, for the fir