The dusty faces of the Moon and Mars conceal unseen hazards for future explorers. Areas of highly oxidising material could be sufficiently reactive that they would produce chemical burns on astronauts’ unprotected skin or lungs. Taking inspiration from a pioneering search for Martian life, a Greek team is developing a device to detect these ‘reactive oxygen species’ – as well as harvest sufficient oxygen from them to keep astronauts breathing indefinitely.

Today, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Pyrenees Mountains in southwest Europe. The mountain range forms a natural border between France and Spain with the small, landlocked country of Andorra sandwiched in between.

Jiuquan (XNA) Mar 01, 2022
China on Sunday morning launched a Long March-4C rocket to place a new land-observation satellite in space. The rocket blasted off at 7:44 a.m. (Beijing Time) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China and soon sent the L-SAR 01B satellite into its preset orbit. The satellite will be used to monitor Earth's geological environment, landslides and earthquakes. Th

Orlando FL (AFNS) Mar 04, 2022
Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall outlined his increasingly urgent roadmap March 3 for successfully bringing about the new technologies, thinking, and cultures the Air and Space Forces must have to deter and, if necessary, defeat modern day adversaries. The particulars of Kendall's 30-minute keynote to Air Force Association's Warfare Symposium weren't necessarily new since they echo

Hamilton, Canada (SPX) Mar 01, 2022
New research by the inventors of a promising pathogen-repellent wrap has confirmed that it sheds not only bacteria, as previously proven, but also viruses, boosting its potential usefulness for interrupting the transmission of infections. The new wrap, designed to protect against contamination on high-touch surfaces such as doorhandles and railings, is now moving toward scaled-up productio

Washington DC (UPI) Mar 3, 2021
NASA has started to assemble the Europa Clipper spacecraft that will probe the icy, scarred surface of Jupiter's moon, Europa, starting in 2030. The agency has been designing and building 10 instruments for the $4.5 billion mission since 2016, and technicians are assembling the parts at NASA's California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA announced Thursday. NASA has tapped Sp

Boulder CO (SPX) Mar 03, 2022
Many coronal loops - ropey strands of plasma that scientists have long thought existed in the Sun's atmosphere - may actually be optical illusions, according to a new paper that challenges prevailing assumptions of what we know, and don't know, about the Sun. The research, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and published in The Astrophysical Journal, relied on a cut

Leuven, Belgium (SPX) Mar 03, 2022
In 2020 a team led by European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers reported the closest black hole to Earth, located just 1000 light-years away in the HR 6819 system. But the results of their study were contested by other researchers, including by an international team based at KU Leuven, Belgium. In a paper published this week these two teams have united to report that there is in fact no bl

Washington DC (UPI) Mar 3, 2021
SpaceX launched another cluster of 47 of its own Starlink Internet communications satellites from Florida on Thursday, as company founder and CEO Elon Musk has confirmed Starlink use by the government of Ukraine during the conflict with Russia. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off as planned into a mostly sunny, blue sky at 9:25 a.m. EST from Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center. At 40 s

London (AFP) March 3, 2022
Global satellite communications company OneWeb announced on Thursday that its board had voted to suspend all launches from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Russia's space agency Roscosmos has sought guarantees from OneWeb and Europe's Arianespace that satellites it plans to launch this year will not be used for military purposes. It also demanded the UK government give up its