Beijing (Sputnik) Dec 18, 2020
According to a report, China's national space agency said it would invite other agencies and foreign partners to work jointly on the project if possible, with the next lunar mission likely to take place in the next five years. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced it will analyse whether it can build a permanent base on the moon, media reports revealed on Thursday.

Beijing (XNA) Dec 18, 2020
For Siziwang Banner of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, falling spacecraft are nothing unusual. Before the landing of Chang'e 5 at 1:59 am on Thursday, the site also welcomed back 11 Shenzhou spacecraft designed for China's manned spaceflight program, as well as 14 astronauts over the past two decades. Siziwang Banner is located at the center of Inner Mongolia, about 80 kilomete

Beijing (XNA) Dec 18, 2020
China plans to use its next moon mission, Chang'e 6, to collect samples from the moon's south pole or possibly the celestial body's far side, according to a key figure in the nation's lunar exploration program. Wu Yanhua, deputy head of China National Space Administration, told China Daily on Thursday after a news conference in Beijing that project managers' current plans call for the Chan

Washington DC (UPI) Dec 17, 2020
United Launch Alliance, which has been a launch provider to the U.S. government for 14 years, plans to send its new Vulcan rocket aloft by late 2021, CEO Tory Bruno said Thursday. The company had been aiming for the first Vulcan launch in mid-2021, but the timeline slipped for the first mission - the Peregrine lunar rover being builkt by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic, Bruno said.

Image: Bubble produced by the Multiscale Boiling experiment on the International Space Station

Paris (ESA) Dec 22, 2020
The optical and infrared instruments of Euclid, ESA's mission to study dark energy and dark matter in space, have passed their qualification and acceptance reviews and are now fully integrated into the spacecraft's payload module. This marks an important step forward in the assembly of the Euclid space telescope, which is scheduled for launch in 2022. The two Euclid instruments, the visibl

Huntsville AL (SPX) Dec 22, 2020
The mystery surrounding the whereabouts of a supermassive black hole has deepened. Despite searching with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have no evidence that a distant black hole estimated to weigh between 3 billion and 100 billion times the mass of the Sun is anywhere to be found. This missing black hole should be in the enormous galaxy in the ce

Evanston IL (SPX) Dec 22, 2020
Although violent and unpredictable, stellar flares emitted by a planet's host star do not necessarily prevent life from forming, according to a new Northwestern University study. Emitted by stars, stellar flares are sudden flashes of magnetic energy. On Earth, the sun's flares sometimes damage satellites and disrupt radio communications. Elsewhere in the universe, however, robust stellar f

Rochester NY (SPX) Dec 22, 2020
While the scientific community grapples with the loss of the Arecibo radio telescope, astronomers who recently revived a long-dormant radio telescope array in Argentina hope it can help modestly compensate for the work Arecibo did in pulsar timing. Last year, scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology and the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomia (IAR) began a pulsar timing study us

San Antonio TX (SPX) Dec 22, 2020
A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists has identified a potentially new meteorite parent asteroid by studying a small shard of a meteorite that arrived on Earth a dozen years ago. The composition of a piece of the meteorite Almahata Sitta (AhS) indicates that its parent body was an asteroid roughly the size of Ceres, the largest object in the main asteroid belt, and formed in the