Copernical Team
Mars mission to pause for about 50 days
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China's Tianwen 1 Mars mission will be inactivated for about 50 days from mid-September due to an expected disruption of its communications with Earth caused by solar electromagnetic radiation, the mission's chief designer said.
During the period, which will end in early November, the Zhurong rover and the mission's orbiter will suspend their working mode, Zhang Rongqiao of the China Natio AFRL extends capability for testing solid rocket motors with new equipment
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The Air Force Research Laboratory's Rocket Propulsion Division has a new capability, a Split-Hopkinson Pressure Bar system, also known as a Kolsky bar, that measures stress at high strain rates and helps analyze material behavior under severe conditions.
"This system will give AFRL a new and unprecedented capability to test and gather data from any solid propellant we can manufacture," sai Rogue Space and Firefly Aerospace sign Launch Service Agreement
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Rogue Space Systems Corporation, a U.S. company that is developing a smart spacecraft program and is planning to offer transport, and in-space services to the growing space market, and Firefly Aerospace, a leading provider of economical and dependable launch vehicles, spacecraft, and in-space services, has announced they have signed a Launch Service Agreement (LSA). The agreement confirms that R Navy conducts test of second stage rocket motor for hypersonic missiles
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The Navy has successfully tested a second stage hypersonic rocket motor, the branch said Thursday.
Navy Strategic Systems Programs successfully conducted the initial live-fire test of the second stage Solid Rocket Motor on Wednesday, in Promontory, Utah, the Navy SSP said in a statement.
The test was done as a step toward developing a common hypersonic missile for the Army and Na GOLD's bird's-eye reveals dynamics in Earth's interface to space
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New research using data from NASA's Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD, mission, has revealed unexpected behavior in the swaths of charged particles that band Earth's equator - made possibly by GOLD's long-term global view, the first of its kind for this type of measurement.
GOLD is in geostationary orbit, which means it orbits around Earth at the same pace the planet Beyond Earth Releases Space Solar Power Report
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The Beyond Earth Institute (BEI) unveiled "Catching the Sun: A National Strategy for Space Solar Power," a new report on Space Solar Power (SSP) today. SSP uses solar panels in space to collect power from the Sun to serve the energy needs of the people on Earth. The full report can be downloaded here.
"It is rare when a single project can help us achieve so many goals" said Tony DeTora, Be ESA has no plans to develop space tourism
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Space tourism is good for space in general but the European Space Agency (ESA) is currently not planning to develop it, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told Sputnik.
"I think it is interesting to see that space is going into a wider domain, including space tourism. I consider this is good for the development of the space economy in general."Aschbacher said on the sidelines of the 36t Russian cosmonauts to track air leaks with vibration sensors
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Cosmonauts will install highly sensitive vibration sensors inside Russian segments at the International Space station in the hope of finding the cause of air leaks, a designer general at the state space firm Energia told Sputnik.
Vladimir Solovyov said the "scientific research" would seek to identify "vibration nodes" to see if they coincide with welding seams. He told Sputnik earlier that Satellite data provide valuable support for IPCC climate report
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Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its latest assessment report laying out the accumulating evidence of the climate crisis. The report identifies Earth observing satellites as a critical tool to monitor the causes and effects of climate change and directly acknowledges the contribution of ESA’s Climate Change Initiative – a research programme that draws on observations from multiple satellite missions.
Doctoral student recruiting volunteers in effort to quadruple number of known active asteroids
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The study of active asteroids is a relatively new field of solar system science, focusing on objects that have asteroid-like orbits but look more like comets, with visual characteristics such as tails.
Because finding an active asteroid is such a rare event, fewer than 30 of these solar system bodies have been found since 1949, so there is still much for scientists to learn about them. Roughly only one out of 10,000 asteroids are classified as active asteroids, so an enormous number of observations will be needed over the span of many years to yield a larger sample for study.
Through funding from a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award in 2018, doctoral student Colin Orion Chandler in Northern Arizona University's Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science just launched an ambitious new project, Active Asteroids, which is designed to engage volunteers in the search for more of these enigmatic objects.