Amherst MA (SPX) May 28, 2021
New research by University of Massachusetts Amherst astronomer Daniel Wang reveals, with unprecedented clarity, details of violent phenomena in the center of our galaxy. The images, published recently in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, document an X-ray thread, G0.17-0.41, which hints at a previously unknown interstellar mechanism that may govern the energy flow and potentiall

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2022 seeks more than $1.2 billion  for military space systems in low-Earth orbit. 

According to budget documents released May 28, nearly $900 million of that investment is for the Space Development Agency’s communications network in low-Earth orbit (LEO) known as the Transport Layer.

Beijing (AFP) May 29, 2021
A Chinese cargo spacecraft carrying equipment and supplies successfully docked with the core module of the country's future space station on Sunday, state media said. A Long March 7 rocket carrying the Tianzhou-2 cargo craft - loaded with essentials such as food, equipment and fuel - blasted off late Saturday from the Wenchang launch site on the tropical southern island of Hainan, the Xinh

Moscow (Sputnik) May 31, 2021
Space debris hit the Canadian remote robotic system onboard the International Space Station (ISS), leaving a small hole in it, but the incident did not affect the operation of the device, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) said on Friday. "While the utmost precautions are taken to reduce the potential for collisions with the ISS, impacts with tiny objects do occur. One such hit was noticed re

Tempe AZ (SPX) May 31, 2021
While scientists know the discovery of alien life would be a game-changing, interstellar event for humanity, the search to date has been unsuccessful. But now, they have a new tool capable of identifying molecular biosignatures that will allow them to look for life in the universe - no matter what form it takes. In a new paper recently published in Nature Communications, a team of scientis

Pasadena CA (JPL) May 31, 2021
A manufacturing innovation that has applications for NASA spacecraft is being transferred to the private sector to support a variety of industries here on Earth. A burst water main is always expensive and messy, but a pipe that fails in space can be mission-ending. That's why NASA technologists work hard to make hardware as reliable as possible. Sometimes that means scrapping the old way o

Washington DC (SPX) May 31, 2021
NASA has selected Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to provide development and operations support for the avionics software suite that will guide the agency's next generation of human rated spacecraft on missions beyond low-Earth orbit. The $49 million Advanced Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) and Avionics Technology Development and Analysis III contr

Neustrelitz, Germany (SPX) May 31, 2021
The auroras are beautiful manifestations of the stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun. But the Sun's plasma eruptions are more than a natural spectacle in the polar regions; they can also interfere with satellites. In extreme cases, space weather may even affect infrastructure on Earth. The Institute for Solar-Terrestrial Physics at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum f

Beijing, China (SPX) May 31, 2021
Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) Collaboration directly observed a spectral softening of helium nuclei at about 34TeV for the first time. This work was based on measurements data of the helium spectrum with kinetic energies from 70 GeV to 80 TeV (17.5 GeV/n to 20 TeV/n for per nucleon) recorded by the DAMPE. Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) offers important ways to deeply understand the astro