London, UK (SPX) Nov 14, 2025
Evidence provided by the European Space Agency was featured in a House of Lords report on space policy, highlighting the benefits and opportunities of ESA-UK cooperation. On 4 November, the House of Lords' UK Engagement with Space Committee published a report entitled "The Space Economy: Act Now or Lose Out". It explores the challenges and opportunities facing the British space sector - an

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Nov 14, 2025
University of Iowa physicist David Nataf will lead a NASA-funded research project focused on producing detailed three-dimensional maps for the study of exoplanets and their host stars. Nataf and his team will address the challenge posed by interstellar extinction, the dimming and reddening of starlight by dust, which obscures observations of exoplanets. Their work will rely heavily on data

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Nov 14, 2025
Space Systems Command continues the process of certifying Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle for National Security Space Launch missions, following the successful NG-2 launch at 3:55 p.m. EST from Space Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The US Space Force Assured Access to Space Certification Team from System Delta 80 observed this second flight of New Glenn. The

Gerroa, Australia (SPX) Nov 17, 2025
The United States faces a narrowing window to claim its position as the first nation to return humans to the Moon in the 21st century. While NASA's official timeline targets Artemis 3 for no earlier than mid-2027 - roughly three years before China's 2030 lunar landing goal - the path forward is fraught with technical complexity, schedule pressure, and the kind of engineering challenges that have historically humbled even the most ambitious space programs.

Washington DC (UPI) Nov 15, 2025
SpaceX launched two rockets with a total of 58 Starlink Internet satellites about 3 1/2 hours apart overnight Saturday in the private company's quickest turnaround from Florida's Space Coast. In all, there have been a record 98 missions this year from the adjacent Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The record of 94 was broken on Monday. Originally, there

Video: 00:22:00

The Sun is always mesmerising to watch, but Solar Orbiter captured a special treat on camera: a dark ‘prominence’ sticking out from the side of the Sun.   

The dark-looking material is dense plasma (charged gas) trapped by the Sun's complex magnetic field. It looks dark because it is cooler than its surroundings, being around 10 000 °C compared to the surrounding million-degree plasma.  

When viewed against the background of space, the hovering plasma is referred to as a prominence. When viewed against the Sun's surface, it is called a filament. (In this image you can see examples of both.) 

Solar prominences and filaments extend for tens of thousands of kilometres, several times the diameter of Earth. They can last days or even months. This video

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Nov 15, 2025
Researchers from Purple Mountain Observatory have conducted an observational test of the black hole area law. Using the gravitational-wave event GW230814, which features a high signal-to-noise ratio, the team closely examined the event horizons of merging black holes. The black hole area law, first proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1971, predicts that the total event horizon area after a merger wil

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Nov 15, 2025
Researchers from the Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGCAS), and Shandong University have identified, for the first time, crystalline hematite and maghemite produced by a major impact event in lunar soil returned from the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin by China's Chang'e-6 mission. These findings, published in Science Advances, offer direct evidence from lunar samples indi

Boston MA (SPX) Nov 15, 2025
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, one of nature's most spectacular visual shows, can be elusive. Conventional wisdom says that to see them, we need to travel to northern Canada or Alaska. However, in the past two years, New Englanders have been seeing these colorful atmospheric displays on a few occasions - including this week - from the comfort of their backyards, as auroras have been vi

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Nov 15, 2025
Vartis Space Corp. has introduced the Vartis Space Clock, an open-source framework that enables independent synchronization of zero-time reference points for space operations without relying on Earth-based signals. The company describes the clock framework as a step toward establishing a temporal infrastructure that supports satellites, lunar operations, and missions throughout the Solar S