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On 8 October at 22:36 local time (9 October at 02:36 BST, 03:36 CEST) the 23rd Vega flight saw 12 satellites launched into Earth orbit. The rocket’s main passengers were the Earth observing THEOS-2 satellite and the meteorological satellite Triton.

THEOS-2 (THailand Earth Observation System-2) is an observation satellite manufactured by Airbus in for the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency of Thailand. THEOS-2 is the largest of the two satellites in the series and will provide the Ministry of Agriculture of Thailand with information on water resources, weather and land use for planning and management.

Triton (formerly known

Washington DC (SPX) Oct 17, 2023
Catching a glimpse of one of the most common and familiar minerals on Earth rarely merits a Webb detects tiny quartz crystals in clouds of hot gas giant. Quartz is found in beach sands, building stones, geodes, and gem shops around the world. It's melted to produce glass, refined for silicon microchips, and used in watches to keep time. So what's so special about the latest discovery from

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Oct 16, 2023
An eruption of Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone National Park is a sight to behold. Indeed, millions of tourists flock to the park each year to see it. Hot water and steam are ejected in the air to a height of 100-180 feet approximately every 90 minutes. Many adjectives come to mind to describe it: powerful, mesmerizing, unique, otherworldly . . . homey? Not so much. Yet new research by

Pasadena CA (JPL) Oct 17, 2023
Earth planning date: Friday, October 13, 2023: It's been an exciting week in space - Conor already mentioned the news from OSIRIS-REX on Wednesday and just before I logged on for my shift this morning the Psyche spacecraft launched. But the week isn't over and weekends on Mars have lots of room for excitement. Wednesday's pre-drilling tests on target 'Sequoia' (shown in the image above) mo

Livermore CA (SPX) Oct 17, 2023
An instrument designed and built by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers departed Earth last week on a two-billion-mile, nearly six-year journey through space to explore a rare, largely metal asteroid. The Livermore high-purity germanium (HPGe) gamma-ray sensor is an essential part of a larger gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) built in collaboration with researchers from Jo

Pasadena CA (JPL) Oct 17, 2023
Earth planning date: Monday, October 16, 2023: We are just at the first steps of the next drilling campaign, as regular readers of this blog will certainly have spotted already. The last plan had the preload test, that little dent we make into the rocks to gauge how both the rock and the rover's arm will react to the pressures and stresses of the drilling. It's a good forecast, but rocks are nat

Cambridge UK (SPX) Oct 16, 2023
Physicists have shown that simulating models of hypothetical time travel can solve experimental problems that appear impossible to solve using standard physics. If gamblers, investors and quantum experimentalists could bend the arrow of time, their advantage would be significantly higher, leading to significantly better outcomes. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have shown

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Oct 17, 2023
One of the most exciting findings from NASA's Dawn mission is that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, hosts complex organics. The discovery of aliphatic molecules, which consist of carbon and hydrogen chains, in conjunction with evidence that Ceres has abundant water ice and may have been an ocean world, means this dwarf planet might have once harb

San Antonio TX (SPX) Oct 17, 2023
Since NASA's Lucy spacecraft first imaged the asteroid Dinkinesh on Sept. 3, 2023, Lucy has traveled over 33 million miles (54 million km) and is now 4.7 million miles (7.6 million km) away from the small asteroid. However, as Dinkinesh continues on its orbit around the Sun, Lucy still has another almost 16 million miles (25 million km) to travel to its meet-up with the asteroid on Nov. 1.

ESA’s navigation testbed vehicle participated in a campaign organised by Norwegian governmental authorities to assess the impact of jamming and spoofing on satnav systems and test innovative technologies for detection and mitigation.