Image: Europe has kicked off the new year with an intense winter heatwave. The warm temperatures and lack of snowfall in the Alps has left several ski resorts with little or no snow. The difference in snow cover is visible in these Copernicus Sentinel-2 images captured in January 2022

The very first European technology to make contact with the surface of the Moon will be on the wheels of the Rashid rover, part of the Emirates Lunar Mission currently on the way to our natural satellite. The outer rims of this rover’s four wheels incorporate small sample panels to test how differing materials cope with the abrasive lunar surface, including a quartet of samples contributed by ESA.

Luxembourg (SPX) Jan 12, 2023
The European Investment Bank (EIB), the financing institution of the European Union, and leading global content connectivity solutions provider SES announced details of their euro 300 million financing agreement at a press briefing at the SES headquarters in Betzdorf, Luxembourg. The seven-year term loan will back investments related to the design, procurement and launch of three previousl

Stockholm, Sweden (SPX) Jan 12, 2023
Unibap AB (publ) has received an order from Thales Alenia Space to provide SpaceCloud solution for technology development targeting use on future satellite missions. The order value is KEUR 182. Thales Alenia Space in Italy has placed a contract with Unibap to use SpaceCloud infrastructure to develop a next generation on-orbit processing solution for future satellite missions. Thales Aleni

Beijing (XNA) Jan 12, 2023
A China-developed space-borne solar camera studying the solar transition region released its first group of scientific data on Wednesday. The 46.5-nanometer extreme-ultraviolet imager or Solar Upper Transition Region Imager (SUTRI), mounted on SATech 01 satellite, was launched into space on July 27, 2022, from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China by a Lijian 1 carrier roc

Baltimore MD (SPX) Jan 12, 2023
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has imaged the inner workings of a dusty disk surrounding a nearby red dwarf star. These observations represent the first time the previously known disk has been imaged at these infrared wavelengths of light. They also provide clues to the composition of the disk. The star system in question, AU Microscopii or AU Mic, is located 32 light-years away in the

Seattle WA (SPX) Jan 12, 2023
Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) have unveiled a first-of-its-kind map that could help answer decades-old questions about the origins of stars and the influences of magnetic fields in the cosmos. The map reveals the likely magnetic field structure of the Local Bubble - a giant, 1,000-light-year-wide hollow in space surrounding our Sun. Like a hunk

Baltimore MD (SPX) Jan 12, 2023
Researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth's diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in La

Washington DC (SPX) Jan 12, 2023
Researchers have developed a way to use laser light to pull a macroscopic object. Although microscopic optical tractor beams have been demonstrated before, this is one of the first times that laser pulling has been used on larger objects. Light contains both energy and momentum that can be used for various types of optical manipulation such as levitation and rotation. Optical tweezers, for

Boston MA (SPX) Jan 12, 2023
Hundreds of black holes previously hidden, or buried, have been found using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result helps give astronomers a more accurate census of black holes in the universe. The black holes in this new study are the supermassive variety that contain millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. While astronomers think that almost all large galaxies harbo