Copernical Team
Aging, overworked and underfunded: NASA faces a dire future, according to experts
Aging infrastructure, short-term thinking, and ambitions that far outstrip its funding are just a few of the problems threatening the future of America's vaunted civil space agency, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
In a report commissioned by Congress, experts said that a number of the agency's technological resources are suffering, including the Deep Space Network—an international collection of giant radio antennas that is overseen by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
Report authors warned that NASA has, for too long, prioritized near-term missions at the cost of long-term investments in its infrastructure, workforce and technology.
"The inevitable consequence of such a strategy is to erode those essential capabilities that led to the organization's greatness in the first place and that underpin its future potential," the report said.
The choice facing the agency is stark, lead author Norman Augustine said Tuesday: Either the U.S. must increase funding for NASA, or the agency must cut some missions.
"For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual," said Augustine, a former executive at Lockheed Martin.
SpaceX launches its 60th Space Coast mission for the year
SpaceX passed 60 launches for the year from the Space Coast early Thursday with a Falcon 9 mission taking a set of five satellites to space.
The rocket flying the BlueBird 1-5 mission launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 40 at 4:52 a.m.
Its first-stage booster flew for the 13th time and brought a sonic boom to parts of Central Florida with a return touchdown back at Canaveral's Landing Zone 1 eight minutes after liftoff.
The payload is the first five of a new constellation of satellites for Midland, Texas-based AST SpaceMobile, part of a space-based cellular broadband network in low-Earth orbit to be accessible by everyday smartphones for both commercial and government use.
Beta test users will be for AT&T and Verizon with an eventual coverage area across the U.S. and in select global markets.
SpaceX is honing in on breaking its 2023 record for launches from either Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral. It managed 68 last year.
So far in 2024, it has flown 60 of the 64 total launches among all Space Coast launch pads, with the other four coming from United Launch Alliance.
MDA Space secures contract with SWISSto12 for antenna systems on HummingSat GEO Satellites
MDA Space Ltd. (TSX: MDA), a key partner in global space missions, has been awarded a contract by SWISSto12 to supply antenna systems for three HummingSat geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites. These satellites are part of the Inmarsat-8 program, which will deliver vital safety services and enhance emergency tracking capabilities.
Under this contract, MDA Space will design and build L-Band Atoms on the edge
Typically, electrons are free agents that can move through most metals in any direction. When they encounter an obstacle, the charged particles experience friction and scatter randomly like colliding billiard balls.
But in certain exotic materials, electrons can appear to flow with single-minded purpose. In these materials, electrons may become locked to the material's edge and flow in one What time is it on the moon? NASA's trying to figure that out
NASA said Thursday its Space Communication and Navigation program is taking the lead on an effort to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time standard as humans prepare to return to the moon.
The program, also known as SCaN, will coordinate with various stakeholders on a timekeeping effort to "enable a future lunar ecosystem" that could also be extended to Mars and other locations in solar sy Lunar Trailblazer completes environmental testing
NASA's Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft has successfully finished the rigorous series of environmental tests designed to ensure it can withstand the challenges of launch and space. With these tests complete, the spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, is now conducting software tests simulating key phases of the mission, including launch, orbital maneuvers, and its science o Mars mission: Wurzburg researchers orchestrate swarm of robots
An enormous canyon stretches across Mars: Valles Marineris is 3,000 kilometres long, 600 kilometres wide and on average eight kilometres deep. Its Latin name goes back to the Mars orbiter "Mariner", which discovered the valley in the early 1970s.
Since 2012, this largest known canyon in the solar system has received special attention from the German Space Agency at the German Aerospace Cen Week in images: 09-13 September 2024
Week in images: 09-13 September 2024
Discover our week through the lens
Weak gravitational lensing: how Euclid maps dark matter
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ESA's Euclid mission is surveying the sky to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. But how can Euclid see the invisible? Watch this video to learn about the light-bending effect that enables scientists to trace how dark matter is distributed in the Universe.
By making use of Euclid’s flagship simulation, the video illustrates how dark-matter filaments subtly alter the shape of galaxies. Light travelling to us from vastly distant galaxies is bent and distorted by concentrations of matter along its way. The effect is called gravitational lensing because matter (both ‘normal’ and dark matter) acts
Fly over Mercury with BepiColombo
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See Mercury in a whole new light, through the ‘eyes’ of the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft, as it sped past Mercury during its latest encounter on 4 September 2024.
During the flyby, BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras (M-CAMs) captured detailed images of the planet’s cratered surface. Within these images, Mercury scientists identified various geological features that BepiColombo will study in more detail once in orbit around the planet.
One such feature, shown in this video, is the newly named Stoddart crater. The name ‘Stoddart’ – after artist Margaret Olrog Stoddart (1865–1934) – was recently assigned following a request from the M-CAM