Copernical Team
Russian cosmonauts perform spacewalk to attach debris shields to space station
Two Russian Cosmonauts conducted a spacewalk Wednesday to upgrade systems on the International Space Station.
Before they set out on the spacewalk, NASA officials said cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin "will venture outside the station's Poisk airlock to attach three debris shields to the Rassvet module."
NASA said the pair "will test the sturdiness of a work platfor Hera’s mini-radar will probe asteroid’s heart
The smallest radar to fly in space has been delivered to ESA for integration aboard the miniature Juventas CubeSat, part of ESA’s Hera mission for planetary defence. The radar will perform the first radar imaging of an asteroid, peering deep beneath the surface of Dimorphos – the Great Pyramid-sized body whose orbit was shifted last year by the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft.
Video: The universe in a box: Preparing for Euclid's survey
ESA's Euclid mission will create a 3D-map of the universe that scientists will use to measure the properties of dark energy and dark matter and uncover the nature of these mysterious components. The map will contain a vast amount of data, it will cover more than a third of the sky and its third dimension will represent time spanning 10 billion years of cosmic history.
But dealing with the huge and detailed set of novel data that Euclid observations will produce is not an easy task. To prepare for this, scientists in the Euclid Consortium have developed one of the most accurate and comprehensive computer simulations of the large-scale structure of the universe ever produced. They named this the Euclid Flagship simulation.
Running on large banks of advanced processors, computer simulations provide a unique laboratory to model the formation and evolution of large-scale structures in the universe, such as galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the filamentary cosmic web they form. These state-of-the-art computational techniques allow astrophysicists to trace the motion and behavior of an extremely large number of dark-matter particles over cosmological volumes under the influence of their own gravitational pull.
The Perseid meteor shower peaks this weekend and it's even better this year
NASA scientific balloons take to the sky in New Mexico
NASA's Scientific Balloon Program will take flight with eight planned launches from the agency's balloon launch facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, flying scientific experiments to a near-space environment via a football-stadium-sized NASA balloon.
The 2023 fall balloon campaign window opens August 10 and features 24 payloads led by teams of scientists, engineers, and students.
"Our annual Fort Sumner campaign is always our most ambitious and packed with cutting-edge science developed from teams here in the United States and around the world," said Debbie Fairbrother, Scientific Balloon Program chief at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
One mission on deck is the Exoplanet Climate Infrared Telescope (EXCITE). The mission features a suborbital astronomical telescope developed to study Jupiter-type exoplanets orbiting other stars.
NASA's ComPair balloon mission readies for flight
A team in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is preparing to fly a balloon-borne science instrument called ComPair, which will test new technologies for detecting gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.
ComPair is slated to fly early in NASA's 2023 fall scientific balloon campaign, which opens on Thursday, Aug. 10, weather permitting.
"Lots of interesting science happens in the energy range that ComPair is designed to study," said Nicholas Kirschner, a graduate student at George Washington University in Washington and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who works on the mission. "These gamma rays are hard to capture with existing methods, so we need to create and test new ones. ComPair's flight gets us one step closer to putting a similar detector in space."
ComPair detects gamma rays with energies between 200,000 and 20 million electron volts. Visible light's energy falls between 2 and 3 electron volts, for comparison.
Supernovae and powerful explosions called gamma-ray bursts shine the brightest in this energy range.
Earendel and the Sunrise Arc in the galaxy cluster WHL0137-08
Image:
This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope shows a massive galaxy cluster called WHL0137-08, and at the right, an inset of the most strongly magnified galaxy known in the Universe’s first billion years: the Sunrise Arc. Within that galaxy is the most distant star ever detected, first discovered by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument reveals the star, nicknamed Earendel, to be a massive B-type star more than twice as hot as our Sun, and about a million times more luminous. Stars of this mass often have companions. Astronomers did not
Ariane 6 joint update report, 9 August 2023
Here is the latest regular report on progress made and upcoming steps towards inaugural flight of the new Ariane 6 launcher.
The next update will be detailed at a media briefing to be held in September.
Deep Space communications to get a laser boost
Set to launch this fall, NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) project will test how lasers could speed up data transmission far beyond the capacity of current radio frequency systems used in space. What's known as a technology demonstration, DSOC may pave the way for broadband communications that will help support humanity's next giant leap: when NASA sends astronauts to Mars.
T DISH Network Corporation and EchoStar Corporation to Combine
DISH Network Corporation (Nasdaq: DISH) and EchoStar Corporation (Nasdaq: SATS) has announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for DISH Network to combine with EchoStar Corporation in an all-stock merger at a fixed exchange ratio. The transaction was negotiated and recommended by Special Committees of Independent Directors of both companies and unanimously approved by the Boards of