Seattle WA (SPX) Jan 06, 2025
Life on Earth could not exist without carbon. But carbon itself could not exist without stars. Nearly all elements except hydrogen and helium - including carbon, oxygen and iron - only exist because they were forged in stellar furnaces and later flung into the cosmos when their stars died. In an ultimate act of galactic recycling, planets like ours are formed by incorporating these star-built at

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jan 06, 2025
A NASA X-ray imager is heading to the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis campaign, where it will capture the first global images of the magnetic field that shields Earth from solar radiation. The Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager, or LEXI, instrument is one of 10 payloads aboard the next lunar delivery through NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, set to launch

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Jan 06, 2025
Icy moons like Europa and Enceladus offer intriguing environments for studying potential extraterrestrial life. These environments, particularly the icy shell, ice-water interface, and seafloor, are considered prime regions for identifying robust biosignatures, extant life, and prebiotic chemical systems. Extraterrestrial Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (Exo-AUVs) play a critical role in these ex

Huntsville AL (SPX) Jan 06, 2025
The Electric Propulsion Club (EPC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), recently traveled to Milan, Italy, to present STARGATE, an experimental gridded ion thruster developed by the group, at the 75th International Astronautical Congress (IAC). The group's STARGATE team consists entirely of UAH undergraduates and is an independent student research organization working in the fields

Charlottesville VA (SPX) Jan 04, 2025
Go faster, farther, more efficiently. That's the goal driving spacecraft propulsion engineers like Chen Cui, a new assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science. Cui is exploring ways to improve electric propulsion thrusters - a key technology for future space missions. "In order to ensure the technology remains viable for long-term missi

Washington DC (UPI) Jan 3, 2024
India's space agency says it is planning a record 10 orbital missions, as well as its first commercial effort, during 2025 after successfully launching a space-docking project this week. Indian Space Research Organization chairman S. Somanath told reporters following Monday's launch of a PSLV-C60 rocket carrying Space Docking Experiment, or SpaDeX, payloads, that the nation has big plan

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At the start of this new year, we look back at close-up pictures and solar flare data recorded by the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission over the last three years. See and hear for yourself how the number of flares and their intensity increase, a clear sign of the Sun approaching the peak of the 11-year solar cycle. 

This video combines ultraviolet images of the Sun's outer atmosphere (the corona, yellow) taken by Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, with the size and locations of solar flares (blue circles) as recorded by the Spectrometer/Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) instrument. The

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ESA's robots get ready to rock at LUNA.

Also known as the Moon on Earth, the LUNA facility near the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany, was unveiled in September 2024, a simulated lunar environment that prepares our return to the Moon. To celebrate, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer joined forces with our robotics experts to showcase their cutting-edge machines Interact and Spot, and the potential of human-robot teamwork for space exploration. 

Meet ESA’s robots: Interact, a wheeled robotic arm, and Spot, a robot dog. ESA’s robotics team in the Netherlands programs these machines for human-robot interaction experiments such as

Image: Pale blue (supernova) dot

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Jan 03, 2025
Spacesail Constellation, a Chinese commercial low-orbit satellite network, has successfully completed its inaugural network connection test, demonstrating the system's capability to support high-speed broadband services for maritime applications. The test, conducted by Shanghai Spacesail Technologies Co., Ltd., assessed the ability of the satellite broadband network to deliver internet con