Blue Canyon Technologies names new CEO
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 11:00
WASHINGTON — Blue Canyon Technologies has promoted one of its co-founders to chief executive to lead the next phase of growth of the Raytheon-owned smallsat manufacturer.
Blue Canyon announced June 8 that Stephen Steg, who had been chief technical officer of the company since its 2008 founding, will take over as chief executive.
New study calls for ‘national dialogue’ on future environmental satellites
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 08:00
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government is poised to make large investments in environmental monitoring satellites but these efforts are not well coordinated across agencies that acquire these systems and the users of data collected by weather satellites, says a new report by the Aerospace Corp.
China releases new Mars image taken by Tianwen 1 probe
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Beijing (XNA) Jun 08, 2021
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) Monday released a new image taken by the Tianwen 1 probe, showing the country's first Mars rover and its landing platform on the red planet's surface.
In the image, taken by a high-resolution camera installed on the orbiter of Tianwen 1 at 6 pm on June 2 (Beijing Time), two bright spots are visible in the upper right corner. The larger one is

Amazon's Jeff Bezos to go to space on Blue Origin rocket
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Washington (AFP) June 7, 2021
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced plans on Monday to fly into space next month on a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, fulfilling what he said was a lifelong dream.
The 57-year-old billionaire said he and his brother Mark will blast off from Earth on July 20 on the first crewed flight of the company's New Shepard launch vehicle.
Blue Origin is auctioning off the third seat in the

NASA's new $23 million space commode system is more than just a toilet
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Washington DC (UPI) Jun 7, 2021
Going to the bathroom at the International Space Station is about to get easier and cleaner with a new toilet system that cost NASA $23 million to develop.
Astronauts are connecting and checking out the toilet, which actually is a high-tech improvement to the space station's water recycling system.
The multimillion-dollar budget for the project includes another unit installed ins

China tests new parachute system for rocket boosters
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Beijing (XNA) Jun 08, 2021
China tested a new rocket-booster parachute system during a recent launch from the southwest of the country, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said on Monday.
The system was tested on June 3 when the meteorological satellite Fengyun-4B was sent into a geostationary orbit via a Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province.

SpaceX's night-time launch sends SiriusXM satellite into orbit
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Washington DC (UPI) Jun 08, 2021
Elon Musk's SpaceX launched a communications satellite for SiriusXM early Sunday from Florida in the first such mission since one of the broadcast company's spacecraft failed after launch in December.
The satellite, known as SXM-8, was lifted aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 12:26 a.m. from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch, which occurred at the start of

Axions could be the fossil of the universe researchers have been waiting for
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
Finding the hypothetical particle axion could mean finding out for the first time what happened in the Universe a second after the Big Bang, suggests a new study published in Physical Review D on June 7.
How far back into the Universe's past can we look today? In the electromagnetic spectrum, observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background - commonly referred to as the CMB - allow us to se

Frozen rotifer reanimated after 24,000 years in the Arctic tundra
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Washington DC (UPI) Jun 7, 2021
Move over water bears, rotifers are pretty tough too.
According to new research, Bdelloid rotifers, a class of microscopic invertebrates, can remain frozen for thousands of years and survive.
Recently, researchers at the Soil Cryology Lab - part of the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, located in Russia - reanimated a Bdelloid rotifer that ha

GMRT measures the atomic hydrogen gas mass in galaxies 9 billion years ago
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Mumbai, India (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR) in Pune, and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), in Bangalore, has used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) to measure the atomic hydrogen gas content of galaxies 9 billion years ago, in the young universe.
This is the earliest epoch in the universe for which there is a measurement of the atomic hydrog

AI spots coronal holes to automate space weather
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Moscow, Russia (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
Scientists from the University of Graz (Austria), Skoltech and their colleagues from the US and Germany have developed a new neural network that can reliably detect coronal holes from space-based observations. This application paves the way for more reliable space weather predictions and provides valuable information for the study of the solar activity cycle. The paper was published in the journ

Stream of stars extends thousands of light-years across the Milky Way
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Princeton NJ (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
It's hard to see more than a handful of stars from Princeton University, because the lights from New York City, Princeton and Philadelphia prevent our sky from ever getting pitch black, but stargazers who get into more rural areas can see hundreds of naked-eye stars - and a few smudgy objects, too.
The biggest smudge is the Milky Way itself, the billions of stars that make up our spiral ga

The origin of the first structures formed in galaxies like the Milky Way identified
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
La Palma (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
An international team of scientists led from the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB, CSIC-INTA), with participation from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), has used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) to study a representative sample of galaxies, both disc and spheroidal, in a deep sky zone in the constellation of the Great Bear to characterize the properties of the stellar populations of

Physicists determine how auroras are created
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Ames IA (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
The aurora borealis, or northern lights, that fill the sky in high-latitude regions have fascinated people for thousands of years. But how they're created, while theorized, had not been conclusively proven.
In a new study, a team of physicists led by University of Iowa reports definitive evidence that the most brilliant auroras are produced by powerful electromagnetic waves during geomagne

New connector for sustainable structures on Earth and in space
Tuesday, 08 June 2021 06:09
Lausanne, Switzerland (SPX) Jun 08, 2021
During his time at EPFL under the Erasmus program, Romain van Wassenhove came up with an idea for a connector that could be used to make modular structures out of sustainable bamboo rather than wood, plastic or metal. "I wanted to focus my Master's on a topic that had meaning to me and that would lead to a concrete application," he says. "Working with bamboo was something I already had in mind w
