Washington DC (UPI) Jan 7, 2021
SpaceX successfully launched a Turkish communications satellite, the Turksat 5A, from Florida on Thursday night. Liftoff occurred at 9:15 p.m. aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which was about 45 minutes later than SpaceX had originally scheduled for the launch though well within its four-hour launch window.

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
As NASA prepares to send astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars, the agency's quest to seek answers about our solar system and beyond continues to inform those efforts and generate new discoveries. The agency has extended the missions of two spacecraft, following an external review of their scientific productivity. The missions - Juno and InSight - have each increased our understanding

McLean CA (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
Airbus has signed a contract with Intelsat to build two OneSat satellites operating in multiple frequency bands for Intelsat's next-generation software-defined network. The contract was signed on 31 December 2020. The satellites will be based on Airbus' OneSat product line, the latest generation of fully flexible, in orbit reconfigurable, Software Defined Satellites (SDS). OneSat is design

Toronto, Canada (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
What feels like up may actually be some other direction depending on how our brains process our orientation, according to psychology researchers at York University's Faculty of Health. In a new study published in PLoS One, researchers at York University's Centre for Vision Research found that an individual's interpretation of the direction of gravity can be altered by how their brain respo

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) signed a new memorandum of understanding (MOU) reaffirming the agencies' longstanding relationship to foster robust American commercial space transportation capabilities, including commercial crew and cargo activities. The NASA-FAA MOU follows the success of NASA's SpaceX Crew-1 launch - the first crewed mission from American soil to be li

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
Orbit Logic has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) contract sponsored by NASA to develop Space Communication Reconstruction and Mapping with Blockchain Ledgering (SCRAMBL) - a secure and distributed communication system that will facilitate cooperation among heterogeneous satellite assets to satisfy constellation-level mission requirements. The solution is being dev

Herndon VA (SPX) Jan 07, 2021
BlackSky has won an award from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) for a multi-phase, multi-year research contract. IARPA is responsible for leading research programs to overcome difficult challenges relevant to the U.S. intelligence community. BlackSky has been selected to aid in the development of IARPA's Space-based Machine Automated Recognition Technique (SMART

Beijing, China (SPX) Jan 07, 2021
Chinese scientists have established the world's first integrated quantum communication network, combining over 700 optical fibers on the ground with two ground-to-satellite links to achieve quantum key distribution over a total distance of 4,600 kilometers for users across the country. The team, led by Jianwei Pan, Yuao Chen, Chengzhi Peng from the University of Science and Technology of China i

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
NASA has chosen four small-scale astrophysics missions for further concept development in a new program called Pioneers. Through small satellites and scientific balloons, these selections enable new platforms for exploring cosmic phenomena such as galaxy evolution, exoplanets, high-energy neutrinos, and neutron star mergers. "The principal investigators of these concept studies bring innov

Hampton VA (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
This little black camera looks like something out of a spy movie - the kind of device one might use to snap discrete photos of confidential documents. It's about half the size of a computer mouse. But the only spying this camera - four of them, actually - will do is for NASA researchers wondering what happens under a spacecraft as it lands on the Moon. It's a tiny technology wi