Washington DC (UPI) Feb 28, 2021
SpaceX failed to launch a cluster of Starlink commuications satellites Sunday night when the countdown halted 1 minute, 24 seconds before the planned liftoff from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. No immediate explanation was given for the scrubbed launch. Elon Musk's rocket company said its next opportunity to get the Falcon 9 rocket off the ground and send 60 satellites into orb

Melbourne FL (SPX) Feb 26, 2021
L3Harris Technologies (has been awarded $89 million for option-year two of a U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command contract to continue maintaining and modernizing infrastructure to track objects in space. The Maintenance Of Space Situational Awareness Integrated Capabilities (MOSSAIC) program has an estimated contract value of $1.2 billion over 10 years. "MOSSAIC improves the syst

La Laguna, Spain (SPX) Feb 26, 2021
A study, led by researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and carried out with OSIRIS, an instrument on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), has found the most densely populated galaxy cluster in formation in the primitive universe. The researchers predict that this structure, which is at a distance of 12.5 billion light years from us, will have evolved becoming a cluste

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 26, 2021
The investigation of Electron-Positron-Ion (EPI) plasma - a fully ionised gas of electrons and positrons that includes astrophysical plasmas like solar winds - has attracted a great deal of attention over the last twenty years. A new study published in EPJ D by Garston Tiofack, Faculty of Sciences, University of Marousa, Cameroon, and colleagues, assesses the dynamics of positron acoustic

Ottawa Canada (XNA) Feb 26, 2021
Canada announced on Thursday that it will send an astronaut to orbit the moon in 2023 as part of NASA's Artemis II mission. "It's official!" Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne tweeted. "Canada will join the US on the first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years." The Gateway Treaty was signed between the Canadian Space Agency (CSA)

East Lansing MI (SPX) Feb 26, 2021
A team of international researchers went back to the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago to gain new insights into the cosmic origin of the heaviest elements on the periodic table. Led by scientists who collaborate as part of the International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA) (irenaweb.org) and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics - Center for the E

Aalborg, Denmark (SPX) Feb 26, 2021
GomSpace and J.P. Morgan have successfully utilized the GOMX-4 satellites for an in-orbit demonstration (IOD) and tested tokenized value transfer in space. The IOD from GomSpace enabled J.P. Morgan to test the world's first bank-led tokenized value transfer in space, executed via smart contracts on a blockchain network established between satellites orbiting the earth. GomSpace and J.P. Mo

Moscow (Sputnik) Feb 26, 2021
Recent unrest in US financial markets has again raised the question of how much and to what degree stocks and cryptocurrencies should be regulated, although the point of the latter is to avoid any centralized control and possibly even to dominate the world's currencies. On Thursday, rumors alleging that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would open a probe into tech billionair

Moscow (Sputnik) Feb 26, 2021
Despite the profit challenges, the chief executive of the British aerospace firm told investors he was excited about bringing on new talent to the leadership team and new investments for the company. Virgin Galactic nosedived 93 percent to $238m, down from $3.7bn the year before, the company said in its fourth quarter reports. Year-on-year losses were $273m up from $211m in 2019, the