London, UK (SPX) Dec 15, 2020
Thales Alenia Space, who have three sites in the UK and employ nearly 200 highly skilled engineers and scientists, have won the contract to design the mother ship for the Comet Interceptor mission, which will see one main spacecraft and two smaller robotic probes - built by the Japanese Space Agency - travel to an as-yet unidentified comet, and map it in three dimensions. Comets are what i

Frozen Arctic soils are set to release vast amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as they continue to thaw in coming decades. Despite concerns that this will fuel future global warming, the scale and speed of this important climate process remain uncertain. To help address this knowledge gap, ESA-funded researchers have developed and released a new permafrost dataset – the longest, satellite-derived permafrost record currently available.

SAN FRANCISCO – Satellite data could play a role in monitoring, reporting and verifying compliance with emissions trading systems also known as cap and trade, Stephanie La Hoz Theuer, a member of the International Carbon Action Partnership (ICAP) Secretariat, said at the virtual American Geophysical Union fall meeting.

Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 02, 2021
The rover rarely drives in a straight line, and our recent drive took the "road less traveled" to investigate a bunch of boulders shed down from a cliff face off to the side of our expected traverse to the south. Why? Beneath the Greenheugh Pediment, the flat-lying, high-standing escarpment to the west, the scientists could see a unique layer with a convoluted texture. In our drive today,

Flagstaff AZ (SPX) Dec 02, 2021
NAU PhD candidate Ari Koeppel, as part of a team of scientists from Northern Arizona and Johns Hopkins Universities, recently discovered that water was once present in a unique but brief manner in a region of Mars called Arabia Terra. Arabia Terra is in the northern latitudes of Mars. Named in 1879 by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, this ancient land covers an area slightly large

Tsukuba, Japan (SPX) Dec 02, 2021
Current simulations of cosmic structure formation do not accurately reproduce the properties of ghost-like particles called neutrinos that have been present in the Universe since its beginning. But now, a research team from Japan has devised an approach that solves this problem. In a study published this month in SC '21: Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Comp

Long Beach CA (SPX) Dec 02, 2021
Rocket Lab USA, Inc. has closed the previously-announced transaction to acquire Planetary Systems Corporation (PSC), a Maryland-based spacecraft separation systems company, for $42 million in cash and 1,720,841 shares of the Company's common stock, plus the potential for an additional 956,023 shares of common stock for a performance earnout based on PSC's CY 2022 and 2023 financial results. Rock

Long Beach CA (SPX) Dec 02, 2021
Rocket Lab USA has revealed its next Electron mission is scheduled to take place during a launch window that opens on December 7, 2021, fewer than three weeks since Rocket Lab's most recent mission on November 18, 2021. These two missions for BlackSky occur 19 days apart and represent Rocket Lab's quickest turnaround in its launch history. The "A Data With Destiny" mission for BlackSky man

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) Dec 02, 2021
The longest - and perhaps the spiciest - plant experiment in the history of the International Space Station, Plant Habitat-04 (PH-04), concluded recently, 137 days after it began. On Nov. 26, Expedition 66 Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei harvested and with other members of the crew sampled some of the 26 chile peppers grown from four plants in the orbiting laboratory's Advanced Plant Habitat (APH