Copernical Team
Impulse Space secures $45M in Series A Funding Round
Impulse Space, Inc. - a leader in the development of in-space transportation services for the inner solar system - has secured $45 million in its Series A funding round. The round is led by RTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of RTX (NYSE: RTX).
"With the support from RTX Ventures, Impulse Space continues on the path toward its mission to provide agile, economic logistics services in any DARPA seeks solutions to preserve bio-samples without cold storage
Emerging infectious disease hotspots are expected to increase globally within the next 50 years.1 Lab-based testing technology has advanced, but agnostic sample preservation still relies on refrigerated transport that can be difficult to acquire and is often unreliable in remote, austere, and contested environments. Consequently, samples critical to force health protection can be significantly d Lockheed Martin's NGI program completes all subsystem PDRs
Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) successfully validated designs for all elements of the nation's Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
Through a series of successful and on-schedule Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) of all NGI major subsystems, the company demonstrated it has achieved design maturity and reduced risk for critical technologies. NGI is the Mars once had wet-dry climate conducive to supporting life: study
NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered the first evidence that Mars once had a climate which alternated between wet and dry seasons similar to Earth, a study said on Wednesday, suggesting the red planet may have once had the right conditions to support life.
Though the surface of Mars is now an arid desert, billions of years ago rivers and vast lakes are thought to have stretched across its s Russian cosmonauts perform spacewalk to attach debris shields to space station
Two Russian Cosmonauts conducted a spacewalk Wednesday to upgrade systems on the International Space Station.
Before they set out on the spacewalk, NASA officials said cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin "will venture outside the station's Poisk airlock to attach three debris shields to the Rassvet module."
NASA said the pair "will test the sturdiness of a work platfor Hera’s mini-radar will probe asteroid’s heart
The smallest radar to fly in space has been delivered to ESA for integration aboard the miniature Juventas CubeSat, part of ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence. The radar will perform the first radar imaging of an asteroid, peering deep beneath the surface of Dimorphos – the Great Pyramid-sized body whose orbit was shifted last year by the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft.
Video: The universe in a box: Preparing for Euclid's survey
ESA's Euclid mission will create a 3D-map of the universe that scientists will use to measure the properties of dark energy and dark matter and uncover the nature of these mysterious components. The map will contain a vast amount of data, it will cover more than a third of the sky and its third dimension will represent time spanning 10 billion years of cosmic history.
But dealing with the huge and detailed set of novel data that Euclid observations will produce is not an easy task. To prepare for this, scientists in the Euclid Consortium have developed one of the most accurate and comprehensive computer simulations of the large-scale structure of the universe ever produced. They named this the Euclid Flagship simulation.
Running on large banks of advanced processors, computer simulations provide a unique laboratory to model the formation and evolution of large-scale structures in the universe, such as galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the filamentary cosmic web they form. These state-of-the-art computational techniques allow astrophysicists to trace the motion and behavior of an extremely large number of dark-matter particles over cosmological volumes under the influence of their own gravitational pull.
The Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend and it's even better this year
NASA scientific balloons take to the sky in New Mexico
NASA's Scientific Balloon Program will take flight with eight planned launches from the agency's balloon launch facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, flying scientific experiments to a near-space environment via a football-stadium-sized NASA balloon.
The 2023 fall balloon campaign window opens August 10 and features 24 payloads led by teams of scientists, engineers, and students.
"Our annual Fort Sumner campaign is always our most ambitious and packed with cutting-edge science developed from teams here in the United States and around the world," said Debbie Fairbrother, Scientific Balloon Program chief at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
One mission on deck is the Exoplanet Climate Infrared Telescope (EXCITE). The mission features a suborbital astronomical telescope developed to study Jupiter-type exoplanets orbiting other stars.
NASA's ComPair balloon mission readies for flight
A team in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is preparing to fly a balloon-borne science instrument called ComPair, which will test new technologies for detecting gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.
ComPair is slated to fly early in NASA's 2023 fall scientific balloon campaign, which opens on Thursday, Aug. 10, weather permitting.
"Lots of interesting science happens in the energy range that ComPair is designed to study," said Nicholas Kirschner, a graduate student at George Washington University in Washington and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who works on the mission. "These gamma rays are hard to capture with existing methods, so we need to create and test new ones. ComPair's flight gets us one step closer to putting a similar detector in space."
ComPair detects gamma rays with energies between 200,000 and 20 million electron volts. Visible light's energy falls between 2 and 3 electron volts, for comparison.
Supernovae and powerful explosions called gamma-ray bursts shine the brightest in this energy range.