Op-ed | The World Below: The need for free and open data in Earth observation activities
Monday, 10 May 2021 13:00
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With President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the United States is set to reestablish its global influence on environmental and climate studies for the coming years. The renewal of the country’s participation in the Paris Agreement is among the clearest examples of the distancing of the Biden administration from former President Donald Trump’s approach to the subject.
With a focus on the low-Earth orbit economy, Voyager eyes more acquisitions
Monday, 10 May 2021 12:00 Write a comment
WASHINGTON — Voyager Space Holdings said May 10 it has closed a deal announced in December to acquire a majority stake in XO Markets, the parent company of commercial space services provider Nanoracks.
Op-ed | Getting Serious About the Office of Space Commerce
Monday, 10 May 2021 12:00 Write a comment
In the absence of an active push, attempts to create organizational change and improvement tend to revert to the way things used to be. After three years of an active push to increase the role of the Office of Space Commerce (OSC) in promoting and enabling commercial space activities, that vision is beginning to revert to the way things used to be.
ESA competition to springboard SMEs into international markets
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Today, ESA opened its Global Space Markets Challenge. This competition is intended to be a springboard into international markets for small promising space-based companies in Europe, specialised in upstream and downstream activities.
From iron rain on exoplanets to lightning on Jupiter: 4 examples of alien weather
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:40 Write a comment
When Oscar Wilde said "conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative" he was unaware of some of the more extreme weather on planets and moons other than Earth.
Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992, more than 4,000 planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than our own.
The continuing research with exoplanets involves trying to identify their atmospheric composition, specifically to answer the question of whether life could exist there. In this search for life though, astronomers have found a huge variety of potential worlds out there.
Here are four examples of bizarre weather on other astronomical bodies—to show how varied an exoplanet atmosphere could be.
1. Iron rain on WASP-76b
WASP-76 is a large, hot exoplanet discovered in 2013. The surface of this monster planet—roughly twice the size of Jupiter—is about 2,200℃ (4,000℉). This means a lot of material that would be solid on Earth melts and vaporizes on WASP-76b.
As described in a particularly famous 2020 study, these materials include iron.
China defends handling of rocket that fell to Earth
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:27 Write a comment
We could detect extraterrestrial satellite megaconstellations within a few hundred light-years
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:12 Write a comment
Starlink is one of the most ambitious space missions we've ever undertaken. The current plan is to put 12,000 communication satellites in low-Earth orbit, with the possibility of another 30,000 later. Just getting them into orbit is a huge engineering challenge, and with so many chunks of metal in orbit, some folks worry it could lead to a cascade of collisions that makes it impossible for satellites to survive. But suppose we solve these problems and Starlink is successful. What's the next step? What if we take it further, creating a mega-constellation of satellites and space stations? What if an alien civilization has already created such a mega-constellation around their world? Could we see it from Earth?
This is the idea behind a recent article posted on the arXiv. It's based on an idea about how civilizations might grow over time, known as the Kardashev scale. It's based on the level of energy a civilization can tap into; Type I uses energy on a global scale, type II a star's worth of energy, and so on.
Protests over SpaceX contract put timetable for lunar return in limbo
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:09 Write a comment
Two space companies that are protesting NASA's $2.9 billion lunar contract award to SpaceX allege the deal would make future moon landings more risky, while the claims leave the timetable for a crewed mission in limbo.
The companies that are protesting the award, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and space tech firm Dynetics, have filed formal complaints with the Government Accountability Office, US DoD close to finalizing recommendations for Space Force National Guard
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:09 Write a comment
The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) called on the US Department of Defense to provide the US Congress with recommendations for a potential Space Force Reserve element. Presently, members of the National Guard are conducting space missions in seven US states and the territory of Guam.
Gen. Daniel Hokanson, chief of the US National Guard Bureau, revealed on Tuesday that he bel International cutting-edge SWOT satellite to survey the world's water
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:09 Write a comment
How much water sloshes around in Earth's lakes, rivers, and oceans? And how does that figure change over time? The upcoming Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission plans to find out. Targeting a late-2022 launch date, this SUV-size satellite will measure the height of Earth's water. SWOT will help researchers understand and track the volume and location of water - a finite resource - a Air Force announces successful simulated hypersonic 'kill chain' test
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:09 Write a comment
A B-52 bomber conducted a successful test of the simulated hypersonic kill chain, using a hypersonic weapon to neutralize a target, the U.S. Air Force said.
The test was a "successful simulated hypersonic kill chain employment from sensor to shooter and back," during the Northern Edge 21 exercises in Alaska, an Air Force statement said on Thursday.
As the B-52 traveled from Barks Perseverance rover captures sound of Ingenuity flying on Mars
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:09 Write a comment
NASA's Perseverance rover has for the first time captured the low-pitched whirring of the Ingenuity helicopter's blades as it flies through the rarefied Martian atmosphere.
The space agency on Friday released new footage shot by the six-wheeled robot of its rotorcraft companion making its fourth flight on April 30 - this time accompanied by an audio track.
The nearly three-minute-long v Skyborg ACS has successful first flight
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The Skyborg leadership team conducted a two-hours and ten minute flight test April 29 of the Skyborg autonomy core system (ACS) aboard a Kratos UTAP-22 tactical unmanned vehicle at Tyndall AFB, Florida.
Termed Milestone 1 of the Autonomous Attritable Aircraft Experimentation (AAAx) campaign, the ACS performed a series of foundational behaviors necessary to characterize safe system operatio Scientists at NREL report new synapse-like phototransistor
Monday, 10 May 2021 11:09 Write a comment
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed a breakthrough in energy-efficient phototransistors. Such devices could eventually help computers process visual information more like the human brain and be used as sensors in things like self-driving vehicles.
The structures rely on a new type of semiconductor - metal-halide perovskites - Nanostructured device stops light in its tracks
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Understanding how light waves oscillate in time as they interact with materials is essential to understanding light-driven energy transfer in materials, such as solar cells or plants. Due to the fantastically high speeds at which light waves oscillate, however, scientists have yet to develop a compact device with enough time resolution to directly capture them.
Now, a team led by MIT resea