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Moscow (AFP) Jan 12, 2021
Russia's cosmonaut training centre said Tuesday it has begun vaccinating employees against the coronavirus ahead of future space missions. The press service of the Yuri Gagarin Training Centre told AFP that around 40 of its nearly 1,500 employees had received the first dose of Russia's homemade coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V. Named after famous Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first pe
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Washington DC (UPI) Jan 6, 2021
For the first time, scientists have observed competition between magnetic orders from coupled sheets of atoms. The observations, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, promise new insights into the quantum qualities of two-dimensional materials. Ever since a pair of British researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, material scientists, electrica
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Washington DC (AFNS) Jan 12, 2021
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has welcomed the U.S. Space Force (USSF) as the 18th member of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). During an afternoon ceremony, Ratcliffe and Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. "Jay" Raymond announced the designation of the intelligence element of the U.S. Space Force as a member of the IC. "This accession reaffirms our commitme
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Bubbles made in space

The month of December comes with holidays for many, but for the International Space Station and mission controls around the world, science never rests.

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WASHINGTON — The private sector is coming out with new geospatial intelligence products and services faster than the government can figure out how to buy them. That means analysts need ways to procure commercial geoint “at a moment’s notice,” said David Gauthier, director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s commercial and business operations group.

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NEW HORIZONS SPACECRAFT ANSWERS QUESTION: HOW DARK IS SPACE?
This artist’s illustration shows NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in the outer solar system. In the background lies the Sun and a glowing band representing zodiacal light, caused by sunlight reflecting off of dust. By traveling beyond the inner solar system and its accompanying light pollution, New Horizons was able to answer the question: How dark is space? At lower right are background stars of the Milky Way.
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Curiosity Rover Reaches Its 3,000th Day on Mars
This panorama, made up of 122 individual images stitched together, was taken by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on November 18, 2020, the 2,946th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

As the rover has continued to ascend Mount Sharp, it's found distinctive benchlike rock formations.

It's been 3,000 Martian days, or sols, since Curiosity touched down on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, and the rover keeps making new discoveries during its gradual climb up Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain it has been exploring since 2014. Geologists were intrigued to see a series of rock "benches" in the most recent panorama from the mission.

Stitched together from 122 images taken on Nov. 18, 2020, the mission's 2,946th sol, the panorama was captured by the Mast Camera, or Mastcam, which serves as the rover's main "eyes.

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WASHINGTON — As many as 53 space missions are projected to lift off in 2021 from Florida’s Space Coast, the vice commander of the 45th Space Wing said Jan. 12.

“We have 53 launches in our forecast with one already on the books,” Col.

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WASHINGTON — L3Harris Technologies announced Jan. 12 it completed the development of an electronic phased array ground antenna for the U.S. Space Force. 

The prototype “multi-band multi-mission” antenna is one three that were developed under a Defense Innovation Unit 2019 contract.

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Kilopower

WASHINGTON — Less than a month after issuing a policy directive on space nuclear power, the White House released an executive order Jan. 12 seeking to promote the development of small nuclear reactors for space and defense applications.

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Cheers! French wine, vines headed home after year in space
This photo provided by NASA shows SpaceX's Dragon undocking from International Space Station on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021. SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule undocked with 12 bottles of Bordeaux wine and hundreds of snippets of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon vines. The capsule is aiming for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast Wednesday night. (NASA via AP)

The International Space Station bid adieu Tuesday to 12 bottles of French Bordeaux wine and hundreds of snippets of grapevines that spent a year orbiting the world in the name of science.

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SpaceX's next idea: Catch Super Heavy boosters with the launch tower
Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX is getting closer and closer to realizing the design for its Starship and Super Heavy launch system. Once complete, it will be the world's first fully reusable launch system and will facilitate trips to low Earth orbit (LEO), the moon and Mars. Construction began on the system's booster element (Super Heavy) this past summer and, according to a recent tweet by Musk, will be "caught" by its launch tower.

The tweet came (as they often do) in response to a question from one of Musk's followers. In this case, it was a space designer who goes by the Twitter handle Erc X (@ErcXspace) who produced a video that illustrates what the Super Heavy might look like as it returns to its . The video is captioned with a question: "Accurate Super Heavy Descent profile?"

Accurate Super Heavy Descent profile? pic.twitter.com/MxIJ0zLzKn

— Erc X (@ErcXspace) December 30, 2020

Musk responded by tweeting:

"We're going to try to catch the Super Heavy Booster with the launch tower arm, using the grid fins to take the load… Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount—ready to refly in under an hour.

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WASHINGTON — Aerojet Rocketdyne has completed the assembly of the first AR1, a new rocket engine funded by the U.S. Air Force. The company does not yet have customers for the engine and plans to market it for first-stage boosters in medium-sized launch vehicles.

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SAN FRANCISCO – French startup Exotrail announced Jan. 12 that its miniature Hall-effect thruster ignited in orbit, and propelled a NanoAvionics R2 cubesat a few hundred meters.

“This is the smallest Hall thruster ever flown and the first time a Hall thruster flew on a satellite of less than 100 kilograms,” Exotrail CEO David Henri told SpaceNews.

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Putting the pieces back together – reconstructing the solar system’s original architecture
LLNL researchers have found that the current locations of many planetary bodies in the solar system are not where they originally formed. Credit: NASA

As the solar system was developing, the giant planets (Jupiter and Saturn) formed very early, and as they grew, they migrated both closer to and further away from the sun to stay in gravitationally stable orbits.

The gravitational effect of these massive objects caused immense reshuffling of other planetary bodies that were forming at the time, meaning that the current locations of many planetary bodies in our solar system are not where they originally formed.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists set out to reconstruct these original formation locations by studying the isotopic compositions of different groups of meteorites that all derived from the asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter). The asteroid belt is the source of almost all of Earth's meteorites, but the material that makes up the asteroid belt formed from sweeping of materials all over the solar system.

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