SpaceX crashes another Starship prototype
Monday, 29 March 2021 13:52WASHINGTON — SpaceX launched its fourth Starship prototype in less than four months March 30, only to have the vehicle apparently crash once again.
The Starship SN11 vehicle lifted off at approximately 9 a.m. Eastern from the company’s Boca Chica, Texas, test site, despite heavy fog that made it all but impossible to see the vehicle ascend.
ESAIL captures two million messages from ships at sea
Monday, 29 March 2021 12:58The ESAIL microsatellite for making the seas safer has picked up more than two million messages from 70 000 ships in a single day.
Virgin Galactic unveils new suborbital spaceplane
Monday, 29 March 2021 11:30WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic revealed its latest suborbital spaceplane March 30, a vehicle that looks similar to its existing SpaceShipTwo but incorporates significant structural improvements.
The company unveiled the first of what it calls the “Spaceship III” line of vehicles, called VSS Imagine.
Photosynthesis could be as old as life itself
Monday, 29 March 2021 11:23Researchers find that the earliest bacteria had the tools to perform a crucial step in photosynthesis, changing how we think life evolved on Earth. The finding also challenges expectations for how life might have evolved on other planets. The evolution of photosynthesis that produces oxygen is thought to be the key factor in the eventual emergence of complex life. This was thought to take
Direct observations confirm that humans are throwing Earth's energy budget off balance
Monday, 29 March 2021 11:23Earth is on a budget - an energy budget. Our planet is constantly trying to balance the flow of energy in and out of Earth's system. But human activities are throwing that off balance, causing our planet to warm in response. Radiative energy enters Earth's system from the sunlight that shines on our planet. Some of this energy reflects off of Earth's surface or atmosphere back into space.
Astronomy and Landscape in the city of Caral, the oldest city in the Americas
Monday, 29 March 2021 11:23A team of researchers, led by the Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio (Incipit-CSIC) and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), in collaboration with the team from the Arqueological Zone of Caral (Peru) led by Dr. Ruth Shady Solis, has established the relation between the position of the monuments of the Supe Culture (Peru), their orientations, and some astronomical and topograph
Brian May helps show Hera’s target asteroid may be ‘dust bunny’
Monday, 29 March 2021 10:16An international research group, including Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May, has shown how the same forces responsible for building dust bunnies under our beds may be responsible for holding the asteroid Didymos together.
NASA exchanged data with China on Mars orbiters
Monday, 29 March 2021 08:40WASHINGTON — NASA sought congressional approval to talk with Chinese counterparts and obtain information on the orbit of China’s new Mars spacecraft, a move intended to lower the risk of a collision with other Mars orbiters.
When clouds collide
Monday, 29 March 2021 08:00Second Scout gets the go-ahead
Monday, 29 March 2021 07:55Following the selection of the first Scout satellite mission last December, ESA has also given the greenlight to start negotiations with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd in the UK to lead the development of the second Scout mission – HydroGNSS.
SpaceX postpones Starship test flight
Monday, 29 March 2021 04:58SpaceX postponed a test flight Monday for the company's Starship moon and Mars rocket in Boca Chica, Texas. Company CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter that the flight was called off because a federal inspector couldn't reach the remote site in time. Musk calls it Starbase, and it is about 23 miles east of Brownsville. "Postponed to no earlier than tomorrow [Tuesday]" Musk wrote.
SwRI scientists discover a new auroral feature on Jupiter
Monday, 29 March 2021 04:58The SwRI-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) orbiting Jupiter aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft has detected new faint aurora features, characterized by ring-like emissions, which expand rapidly over time. SwRI scientists determined that charged particles coming from the edge of Jupiter's massive magnetosphere triggered these auroral emissions. "We think these newly discovered faint ultraviolet
String theory solves mystery about how particles behave outside a black hole photon sphere
Monday, 29 March 2021 04:58A paper by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Director Ooguri Hirosi and Project Researcher Matthew Dodelson on the string theoretical effects outside the black hole photon sphere has been selected for the "Editors' Suggestion" of the journal Physical Review D. Their paper was published on March 24, 2021. In a quantum theory of point particles,
Black hole seeds key to galaxies behemoths
Monday, 29 March 2021 04:58A new black hole breaks the record - not for being the smallest or the biggest - but for being right in the middle. The recently discovered 'Goldilocks' black hole is part of a missing link between two populations of black holes: small black holes made from stars and supermassive giants in the nucleus of most galaxies. In a joint effort, researchers from the University of Melbourne a
New study finds satellites contribute significant light pollution to night skies
Monday, 29 March 2021 04:58Scientists reported new research results today suggesting that artificial objects in orbit around the Earth are brightening night skies on our planet significantly more than previously understood. The research, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, finds that the number of objects orbiting Earth could elevate the overall brightness of the n