Danish ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen has been assigned a long-duration mission to the International Space Station and is expected to fly as the pilot of a Crew Dragon spacecraft in mid 2023 or early 2024.

Washington DC (UPI) Mar 23, 2021
Meals are set to get a little more exciting at the International Space Station next month as celebrity chef Jose Andres and his company ThinkFoodGroup will send two dinners to space, as a multinational crew joins astronauts already in orbit. Andres is giving two dishes - the popular rice dish Chicken and Mushroom Paella and the pork and tomato offering Secreto de Cerdo with Pisto - to

Washington DC (UPI) Mar 23, 2021
Spinosaurus, the largest known predatory dinosaur, had bones dense enough to submerge itself to hunt, according to a study released Wednesday. A group of paleontologists analyzed the density of Spinosaurid bones and compared them to animals such as penguins, hippos, and alligators to determine that both the Spinosaurus and close relative Baryonyx could swim and actively pursue prey in t

Geneva (AFP) March 23, 2022
The United Nations said Wednesday it wanted the whole world covered by weather disaster early warning systems within five years to protect people from the worsening impacts of climate change. A third of the world's people, mainly in the least-developed countries and developing small island states, are without early warning coverage, the UN said, with 60 percent of people in Africa wide open

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Mar 23, 2022
NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, a joint effort with the Italian Space Agency, has returned data that no other spacecraft has obtained before from a few extreme cosmic objects. Launched in December 2021, IXPE has detected polarized X-rays from three of its first six targets. Polarized X-rays carry unique details about where the light comes from and what it passes t

University Park PA (SPX) Mar 23, 2022
he number of sunspots on our Sun typically ebbs and flows in a predictable 11-year cycle, but one unusual 70-year period when sunspots were incredibly rare has mystified scientists for three hundred years. Now a nearby Sun-like star seems to have paused its own cycles and entered a similar period of rare starspots, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. Continuing to observe this star

Germantown MD (SPX) Mar 23, 2022
Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES), an innovator in satellite and multi-transport technologies and networks for 50 years, has announced the award of an $18 million contract from the Department of Defense (DoD) to deploy a standalone 5G network at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state. The Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) was issued through the Information Warfare Research

Moscow (Sputnik) Mar 23, 2022
The Meridian series of dual-use civilian/military communications satellites began to sent to space in the mid-2000s. In 2019, the first upgraded Meridian-M satellite was deployed. The Russian military has taken control over the Meridian-M communications satellite after its launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz rocket on Tuesday, the Ministry of Defence has announced. "Th

NASA announced March 23 that it will support development of a second lander to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface to provide competition with SpaceX for the later “sustainable” phase of the Artemis program.

Moscow (AFP) March 23, 2022
The Russian space agency said Wednesday it will insist its international partners pay it in rubles, after President Vladimir Putin said Russia will only accept ruble payments for gas deliveries to "unfriendly countries". "We will also conclude all our external agreements in rubles," the Roscosmos space agency head Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying by the official Tass news agency. Hour