Greenbelt MD (SPX) Oct 01, 2021
NASA has awarded a contract for Sun-Sky Scanning Sun Photometers to CIMEL Electronique of Paris, France to support the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET). This is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract with an estimated total ordering value of $10M. The five-year period of performance begins on September 28 and includes one six-month option. The work will be pe

Pasadena CA (SPX) Oct 01, 2021
Since LIGO's groundbreaking detection, in 2015, of gravitational waves produced by a pair of colliding black holes, the observatory, together with its European partner facility Virgo, has detected dozens of similar cosmic rumblings that send ripples through space and time. In the future, as more and more upgrades are made to the National Science Foundation-funded LIGO observatories-one in

ESA and Mattel have released a Samantha Cristoforetti Barbie doll to coincide with World Space Week 2021 and its theme of ‘Women in Space’, to help encourage girls to become the next generation of astronauts, engineers and space scientists.

NASA’s administrator says he remains confident that Congress will provide the agency with funding to allow it to select a second lunar lander developer despite a lack of public progress on funding and concerns raised elsewhere in the agency about the effect an ongoing protest could have on congressional support for the program.

Millennium, a satellite manufacturer owned by the Boeing Co., hopes to parlay the experienced gained from the Wide Field of View project into larger contracts.

SpaceNews

Paris (ESA) Oct 04, 2021
The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission captured this view of Mercury on 1 October 2021 as the spacecraft flew past the planet for a gravity assist manoeuvre. The image was taken at 23:44:12 UTC by the Mercury Transfer Module's Monitoring Camera 2, when the spacecraft was about 2418 km from Mercury. Closest approach of about 199 km took place shortly before, at 23:34 UTC. In this v

Washington DC (UPI) Oct 1, 2021
The Mars helicopter Ingenuity is on its own without NASA's guidance for two weeks as the sun interferes with communications to the Red Planet. Sometime around Oct. 14, NASA plans to check in with the helicopter and the Mars rover Perseverance. Previous rovers have endured so-called solar conjunction communication dropouts, but never has a tiny aircraft sat alone on the planet for so lon

Tucson AZ (SPX) Oct 04, 2021
Little is known about the population of metal-rich Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs), their number, origin, and relationship with meteorites found on Earth. A new paper by Planetary Science Institute Associate Research Scientist Juan Sanchez explains how near-infrared spectroscopic data of two NEAs reveals new information about the composition and physical properties of these bodies. "We find th

Paris (AFP) Oct 2, 2021
The European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft has sent back its first images of Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, the European Space Agency said Saturday. The images were obtained almost three years after the unmanned mission vessel was launched aboard an Ariane 5 Rocket. The cameras attached the BepiColombo provided black-and-white images, the ESA said in a statement. But as th

Paris, France (SPX) Oct 04, 2021
Space based network infrastructure will very soon complement the 5G terrestrial mobile networks that are currently being deployed. This will lead to satellite communications becoming an integrated and indispensable part of the global telecommunications ecosystem with the potential to grow existing market segments such as backhauling and to expand into new areas such as hybrid networks and the In