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Eye of ESA's asteroid mission

Friday, 02 July 2021 07:41
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Paris (ESA) Jul 02, 2021
This is the main camera that ESA's Hera mission for planetary defence will be relying on to explore and manoeuvre around the Didymos asteroid system. Hera - named after the Greek goddess of marriage - will be, along with NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft, humankind's first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15%
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Washington DC (SPX) Jul 02, 2021
NASA is preparing to establish a regular cadence of trips to the Moon under Artemis. To help the agency fine-tune its approach, NASA will award firm fixed-price, milestone-based contracts of up to $45 million for commercial-led work under a broad agency announcement released Thursday. NASA is seeking new work to mature designs and conduct technology and engineering risk-reduction tasks for
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Laconia, NH (SPX) Jul 02, 2021
Rogue Space Systems Corporation announced the signing of a Letter of Intent by Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC), the world's first large scale space construction company, to lease two Laura Orbital Robot (Orbots) spacecrafts for Orbital Assembly's P-STAR Mission to launch construction technologies for the first low gravity space hotel. As part of the agreement, Rogue Space and Orbital As
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Washington (AFP) July 1, 2021
Barrier-breaking woman aviator Wally Funk, 82, will join Jeff Bezos this month on the first crewed spaceflight for the billionaire's company Blue Origin, the firm announced Thursday. The trip is 60 years overdue for Funk, who was one of the Mercury 13 - the first women trained to fly to space from 1960-1961, but excluded because of their gender. On July 20, she will become the oldest pe
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Boston MA (SPX) Jul 02, 2021
There are certain rules that even the most extreme objects in the universe must obey. A central law for black holes predicts that the area of their event horizons - the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape - should never shrink. This law is Hawking's area theorem, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who derived the theorem in 1971. Fifty years later, physicists at MIT and elsew
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Huntsville AL (SPX) Jul 02, 2021
A scientifically mysterious, isolated cloud bigger than the Milky Way has been found by a research team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in a "no-man's land" for galaxies. The so-called orphan or lonely cloud is full of hot gas with temperatures of 10,000-10,000,000 degrees Kelvin (K) and a total mass 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That makes it larger than the mass

Closing the gap on the missing lithium

Friday, 02 July 2021 07:41
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Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jul 02, 2021
There is a significant discrepancy between theoretical and observed amounts of lithium in our universe. This is known as the cosmological lithium problem, and it has plagued cosmologists for decades. Now, researchers have reduced this discrepancy by around 10%, thanks to a new experiment on the nuclear processes responsible for the creation of lithium. This research could point the way to a more
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Xining (XNA) Jul 02, 2021
The construction of a survey telescope array, which will be mainly used to detect space debris in medium and high orbits, has begun in northwest China's Qinghai Province, taking advantage of the plateau region's clear night skies. The multi-application survey telescope array, MASTA, developed by the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is under construction in th
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Boston MA (SPX) Jul 01, 2021
When extreme and dangerous air pollution events strike and blanket the air with hazardous levels of pollution, it causes a major threat to public health and safety. It's also exceedingly challenging to monitor. The pollutants move quickly through the atmosphere, and can undergo chemical transformations from one form to another, leaving it difficult to predict the level of human exposure. I
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Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Sixty years after joining a private program with the hope of one day becoming an astronaut, US pilot Wally Funk will finally see her dream come true at age 82.

On Thursday, Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos invited her to join him on his spaceflight company Blue Origin's July 20 launch.

The flight will not just make her the ever to travel in space, but also a walking, breathing symbol of the rewards of audacity and perseverance.

"I like to do things that nobody's ever done," she said in a video posted on Instagram by Bezos.

Mercury 13

Funk grew up in the western United States in Taos, New Mexico. As a child she was passionate about aviation and took her first flying lesson at age nine. In , she was barred from taking mechanics, a subject reserved for boys.

Such rules did not prevent her from obtaining a pilot's license and graduating from Oklahoma State University, known for its aviation . By now she has logged 19,600 hours of flight time.

At the very beginning of the 1960s she joined a privately-funded, innovative flight program called Mercury 13—which put women through the same training and tests as the male astronauts undergoing the official NASA program.

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Richard Branson announces trip to space, ahead of Jeff Bezos
In this undated image from video provided by Blue Origin on Thursday, July 1, 2021, Mercury 13 astronaut trainee Wally Funk, right, meets with Jeff Bezos. On Thursday, Blue Origin announced the early female aerospace pioneer will be aboard the company's July 20 launch from West Texas, flying as an "honored guest." Credit: Blue Origin via AP

Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.

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Part of the Frisian Islands, a low-lying archipelago just off the coast of northern Europe, is visible in this image captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2.

Part of the Frisian Islands, a low-lying archipelago just off the coast of northern Europe, is visible in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

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Branson Astronaut 001

WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson will be on the company’s next flight of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle July 11, going to space days before fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Virgin Galactic announced late July 1 that it had scheduled its next flight of SpaceShipTwo, called “Unity 22,” for July 11 at no earlier than 9 a.m.

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Astra team at Nasdaq

TAMPA, Fla. — Astra’s shares closed up 4.5% to $12.90 July 1 after the launch vehicle developer’s first day on the Nasdaq stock exchange, which raised nearly $500 million ahead of its first commercial mission this summer.

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WASHINGTON — NASA is taking a slow and deliberate approach to restoring operations of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been out of service since mid-June when a payload computer malfunctioned.

Hubble stopped science operations June 13 when the payload computer, which runs the telescope’s instruments, malfunctioned.

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