Copernical Team
Space company Maxar plans to go private with $6.4 billion deal
Space company Maxar announced an agreement to go private on Friday in an acquisition led by private equity firm Advent International.
The deal gives Maxar a value of $6.4 billion. Advent will take a $3.1 billion stake in the space company, with British Columbia Investment Management Corporation making a $1 billion equity contribution.
"This announcement is an exceptional outcome for One ESA: now in six languages
One ESA: now in six languages
The One ESA brochure explores ESA’s establishments and how they work together on European space missions. The brochure is printed in English and is available as a PDF and interactive format in five additional languages.
One year ago, a perfect launch for the James Webb Space Telescope
The voice counted backwards in French from ten to one, then announced, “Décollage” – lift-off. The 15-year-long collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency had just entered its most critical phase: the launch itself. What happened next would determine whether the James Webb Space Telescope made it into space or not.
SpaceX launches 54 Starlink communication satellites
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida on Saturday carrying 54 Starlink Internet satellites.
The Falcon 9 was launched from Kennedy Space Center and was making its 15th flight to space. The rocket's first stage returned to Earth just under nine minutes later, landing on a SpaceX robotic drone ship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.
The satellites will ad Rocket Lab scrubs first U.S. Electron launch over high winds
U.S. launch and space systems company Rocket Lab called off its Sunday evening liftoff of its first Electron rocket mission from the United States over upper-level high winds.
The launch at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia was scrubbed with less than a dozen minutes left in the count down.
"All stations, unfortunately, we are going to be no go today," the launch directo Space crew using robotic arm to inspect damaged capsule
The crew of the International Space Station on Sunday was inspecting an attached Russian space capsule that may have been damaged by a micrometeorite, while ground controllers considered whether to send up a replacement spaceship to ferry some of them home.
Russia's space corporation, Roscosmos, said the crew was using a camera on a Canadian-built robotic arm to capture images of the Soyuz MS-22 where a coolant leak was detected last Wednesday night, U.S. time. After the images are transmitted to the ground on Monday, space officials will analyze them—along with other data about the problem—by month's end and decide on next steps.
One option, Roscomos said, is to expedite the delivery of another Soyuz capsule to the space station. Workers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan are preparing to launch Soyuz MS-23 to the space station next March with three crew members but could send it up sooner without a crew. That would allow some of the seven crew now on the space station to return home.
A Russian space official said last Thursday a micrometeorite could have caused the leak.
New study confirms the light from outside our galaxy brighter than expected
Scientists analyzed new measurements showing that the light emitted by stars outside our galaxy is two to three times brighter than the light from known populations of galaxies, challenging assumptions about the number and environment of stars are in the universe. Results of the study led by researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology have been posted to ArXiv and accepted for publication i Two exoplanets may be mostly water, Hubble and Spitzer find
A team led by researchers at the University of Montreal has found evidence that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star are "water worlds," where water makes up a large fraction of the entire planet. These worlds, located in a planetary system 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, are unlike any planet found in our solar system.
The team, led by Caroline Piaulet of the Trottier ESPRESSO and CARMENES discover two potentially habitable exo-Earths around a star near the Sun
"Nature seems bent on showing us that Earth-like planets are very common. With these two we now know 7 in planetary systems quite near to the Sun" explains Alejandro Suarez Mascareno, an IAC researcher, who is the first author of the study accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The newly discovered planets orbit the star GJ 1002, which is at a distance of less than 16 ligh Comet impacts could bring ingredients for life to Europa's ocean
Comet strikes on Jupiter's moon Europa could help transport critical ingredients for life found on the moon's surface to its hidden ocean of liquid water - even if the impacts don't punch completely through the moon's icy shell.
The discovery comes from a study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, where researchers developed a computer model to observe what happens afte