...the who's who,
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Space Careers

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The International Space Station cost more than $100 billion. A ham radio set can be had for a few hundred bucks.

Perhaps that explains, in part, the appeal of having one of humankind's greatest scientific inventions communicate with Earth via technology that's more than 100 years old. But perhaps there's a simpler explanation for why astronauts and operators have been talking, and talking, for years.

NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock was just a few weeks into his six-month mission at the station when feelings of isolation began to set in.

Wheelock would be separated from loved ones, save for communication via an internet phone, email or social media. At times, the stress and tension of serving as the station's commander could be intense.

One night, as he looked out a window at the Earth below, he remembered the space station's ham radio. He figured he'd turn it on—see if anyone was listening.

"Any station, any station, this is the International Space Station," Wheelock said.

A flood of voices jumbled out of the airwaves.

Astronauts aboard the space station often speak to students via ham radio, which can also be used in emergencies, but those are scheduled appearances.

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Bishop at ISS

WASHINGTON — Voyager Space Holdings, a company that has acquired several space ventures, is taking a majority stake in commercial space station company Nanoracks, the two firms announced Dec. 23.

Voyager announced it would take a majority stake in XO Markets, the parent company of Nanoracks.

A-68A iceberg thinning at 2.5 cm per day

Tuesday, 22 December 2020 15:30
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Depth of the A-68A iceberg

Latest images reveal that the A-68A iceberg has shattered into multiple pieces, with two large fragments of ice breaking off from the main berg and floating away in the open ocean. Scientists using satellite data have not only been monitoring the iceberg’s journey across the South Atlantic Ocean, but have been studying the iceberg’s ever-changing shape.

Using AI to count and map craters on the moon

Tuesday, 22 December 2020 15:01
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Side view of the crater Moltke taken from Apollo 10. Credit: Public Domain

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China, one from Italy and one from Iceland has used a machine-learning artificial intelligence application to count and note the location of over 100,000 craters on the moon. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes programming their system to recognize craters by training it with data collected by Chinese lunar orbiters.

Prior work identifying and mapping craters on the moon has tended to be a slow process—it has generally been done by hand, with researchers studying photographs and transferring those observations to maps or moon globes. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to dramatically speed up the process by teaching a computer to identify craters and then to count them.

Teaching a computer to recognize craters on the moon has been a difficult process due to the many forms craters can take. Not all are round, and they are of different ages, which means defining characteristics have eroded over long periods of time.

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The Pentagon’s overseers in Congress have been consistently critical of how the military acquires space hardware. Frustration with space procurements was in fact one of the catalysts for the creation of the U.S.

Year in images 2020

Tuesday, 22 December 2020 13:39
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This image is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has observed during its 30-year lifetime. The portrait features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbour NGC 2020 which together form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, approximately 163 000 light-years away.

Our year through the lens: a selection of our favourite images for 2020

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Image: Space bauble
Credit: Technical University Darmstadt

Deck the halls with space-based bubbles!

Here is a festive bauble you will not see on Earth: a bubble produced by the Multiscale Boiling experiment, known affectionately as Rubi.

In this image, are pulling the bubble upwards and making it spherical, producing not only a cool image but also cool insights into the boiling process.

Understanding how boiling behaves in weightlessness is imperative because gravity plays an important role. Without gravity, boiling takes place in and produces larger bubbles. This has allowed scientists to observe and measure effects that are too fast and too small on Earth.

The experiment is also installed with an electrode to observe the effect of an electric field on the bubbles, enabling scientists to observe and quantify the effect of external forces.

"Boiling is an extremely efficient way of getting rid of excess heat. This research could therefore provide very valuable information for improving the in space as well as in terrestrial applications," says ESA project scientist Daniele Mangini.

With this insight and more accurate calculations of the boiling process, products such as laptops can be improved and made more compact.

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VALETTA, Malta —  Through a novel approach to testing, the European Space Agency’s Clean Space initiative is assisting in the development of satellite components that are designed for demise, an approach to satellite development that advocates for the safe disposal of spacecraft by destructive atmospheric reentry.

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Season's greetings

Season's greetings from the European Space Agency

Europe's Spaceport prepares for Ariane 6

Tuesday, 22 December 2020 09:40
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Ariane 6 assembly building

Europe' Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana is gearing up for the arrival of Ariane 6, Europe's new generation launch vehicle.

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Washington DC (SPX) Dec 23, 2020
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is holding a public scoping period for the draft Environmental Assessment (EA) related to plans by SpaceX to apply for licenses for suborbital and orbital launches of its Starship/Super Heavy project at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The scoping period will help the FAA in determine the scope of issues for analysis in the draft EA. The FAA requ
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Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 23, 2020
Marvels of engineering, the rover's sample tubes must be tough enough to safely bring Red Planet samples on the long journey back to Earth in immaculate condition. The tubes carried in the belly of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover are destined to carry the first samples in history from another planet back to Earth. Future scientists will use these carefully selected representatives of M
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Alicante, Spain (SPX) Dec 23, 2020
EMXYS and the Royal Observatory of Belgium have been selected by the European Space Agency to provide a gravimeter for the Juventas spacecraft that will land on asteroid Dimorphos as part of the European Space Agency's planetary defence programme. EMXYS and the Royal Observatory of Belgium will provide the GRASS instrument that will make measurements on the gravity field of the asteroid Di
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Sydney, Australia (The Conversation) Dec 23, 2020
In the northern sky in December is a beautiful cluster of stars known as the Pleiades, or the "seven sisters". Look carefully and you will probably count six stars. So why do we say there are seven of them? Many cultures around the world refer to the Pleiades as "seven sisters", and also tell quite similar stories about them. After studying the motion of the stars very closely, we believe
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Washington DC (SPX) Dec 22, 2020
Researchers at the George Washington University, together with researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the deep-tech venture startup Optelligence LLC, have developed an optical convolutional neural network accelerator capable of processing large amounts of information, on the order of petabytes, per second. This innovation, which harnesses the massive parallelism of l
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