The longest corridor in ESA’s largest establishment was turned into a test site for one of the Agency’s most ambitious future missions, Proba-3. The two satellites making up this mission will line up so that one casts a shadow onto the other, revealing inner regions of the Sun’s ghostly atmosphere. But such precision formation flying will only be possible through a vision-based sensor system allowing one satellite to lock onto the other.

Climate change is having an undeniable influence on coastal areas. A substantial proportion of the world’s sandy coastlines are already eroding owing to increased storm surges, flooding and sea level rise. With our coastal environments in constant change, Earth observation satellites are being used to better strengthen our knowledge of changing coastlines.

Moscow (Sputnik) Mar 29, 2021
The Russian Progress MS-14 resupply spacecraft that is currently at the International Space Station (ISS) has set a new flight duration record, according to Sputnik calculations. At 01:45 GMT on Sunday, Progress MS-14 broke the record set by Russian Progress M-17 cargo spacecraft that was in orbit for 337 days in 1993-1994. Progress MS-14 was launched on April 25, 2020 and is current

Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 26, 2021
Designed to spot potential natural hazards and help researchers measure how melting land ice will affect sea level rise, the NISAR spacecraft marks a big step as it takes shape. An SUV-size Earth satellite that will be equipped with the largest reflector antenna ever launched by NASA is taking shape in the clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Called

Helsinki, Finland (SPX) Mar 29, 2021
In the recent past, space missions dedicated to the study of astrophysical signals in the high-energy spectrum revealed a series of enigmatic excesses not predicted by the theoretical models. In order to find an explanation for these anomalies, many solutions have been proposed. The most exciting hypothesis invokes the contribution of the elusive dark matter, the mysterious form of matter 4 time

Leuven, Germany (SPX) Mar 29, 2021
Until now, Europe has had two major collaborative networks for ground-based astronomy, one in the optical wavelength domain and the other in the radio-wave domain. OPTICON and RadioNet have now come together to form Europe's largest ground-based astronomy collaborative network. Launched with funding to the tune of euro 15 million under the H2020 programme, the project aims to harmonise ob

Hirosawa, Japan (SPX) Mar 29, 2021
Astronomers are now in a better position to interpret observations of supernova remnants thanks to computer simulations of these cataclysmic events by RIKEN astrophysicists1. When certain types of stars die, they go out in a blaze of glory-an incredibly powerful explosion known as a supernova. One of the most common forms of supernova, type Ia, starts with a dense white dwarf star that has

Cape Canaveral FL (SPX) Mar 26, 2021
The U.S. Space Force's Space and Missile Systems Center successfully delivered the fifth Space Based Infrared System satellite (SBIRS GEO-5) to the processing facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The satellite traveled across the country from the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Center satellite integration facility in Sunnyvale, California via a C-5M Super Galaxy on March

McLean VA (SPX) Mar 29, 2021
OneWeb has announced a Memorandum of Understanding with US DoD satellite communications application specialist, TrustComm Inc. OneWeb and TrustComm will enable Low Earth Orbit (LEO) connectivity to government customers. The agreement, signed on 16 March, envisions OneWeb and TrustComm working together to deliver OneWeb's high speed, low latency, beyond line-of-sight communications services - wit

Herndon VA (SPX) Mar 26, 2021
BlackSky has announced that its latest Gen-2 satellite, BlackSky 7, delivered first insights within 24 hours of launch. Within that time frame, the BlackSky operations team conducted satellite checkout and the satellite collected its first images. At the same time, those images were downlinked, processed and analyzed using BlackSky's Spectra AI suite of AI/ML algorithms to detect objects of inte