Washington DC (UPI) Jul 14, 2021
China has harvested its first batch of rice grown from seeds that traveled to space on the country's Chang'e-5 lunar probe, officials said Sunday. About 40 grams of seeds made the trip to the moon last November. Some seeds can mutate and produce higher yields when planted on Earth after being exposed to cosmic radiation and zero gravity. The Chinese have been sending seeds into space

Berkeley CA (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
Magnetars are bizarre objects - massive, spinning neutron stars with magnetic fields among the most powerful known, capable of shooting off brief bursts of radio waves so bright they're visible across the universe. A team of astrophysicists has now found another peculiarity of magnetars: They can emit bursts of low energy gamma rays in a pattern never before seen in any other astronomical

Washington DC (UPI) Jul 13, 2021
Astronomers have discovered four nearby exoplanets they hope will help scientists learn about Earth's poorly understood teenage years. The exoplanets were found orbiting two known stars, TOI 2076 and TOI 1807, which were born from the same gas cloud some 200 million years ago. Both of the stars are K-dwarfs, or orange dwarfs, which are medium-sized, hydrogen-burning main sequence

Ithaca NY (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
Traces of the gas phosphine point to volcanic activity on Venus, according to new research from Cornell University. Last autumn, scientists revealed that phosphine was found in trace amounts in the planet's upper atmosphere. That discovery promised the slim possibility that phosphine serves as a biological signature for the hot, toxic planet. Now Cornell

Baltimore MD (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
Northrop Grumman has broken ground on a Hypersonics Center of Excellence to support the U.S. military and its allies in the fight against evolving threats. Through its investments in digital engineering and smart infrastructure at its Elkton, Maryland facility, Northrop Grumman will provide full lifecycle production for hypersonic weapons, from design and development to production and integratio

Orlando FL (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
Rocket launches and spacecraft landings will be tracked and monitored along with airplane traffic to enhance safety in a new program announced Thursday by the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA hopes the new space tracking system, called Space Data Integrator, will increase efficiency in the space launch industry by minimizing the need to close airspace around rocket launches for ext

Huntsville AL (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
NASA is leading an effort, working with the Department of Energy (DOE), to advance space nuclear technologies. The government team has selected three reactor design concept proposals for a nuclear thermal propulsion system. The reactor is a critical component of a nuclear thermal engine, which would utilize high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel. The contracts, to be awarded through the DOE'

London, UK (SPX) Jul 15, 2021
One of the biggest challenges facing the space sector is orbital congestion and space debris. There are currently around 3,000 working satellites in orbit, and an estimated 130 million other pieces of debris, including old satellites, spent rocket bodies and even tools dropped by astronauts. One collision could create thousands of small, fast-moving fragments, damaging the satellites that

Tel-Aviv, Israel (SPX) Jul 15, 2021
Dr. Iair Arcavi, a Tel Aviv University researcher at the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, participated in a study that discovered a new type of stellar explosion - an electron-capture supernova. While they have been theorized for 40 years, real-world examples have been elusive. Such supernovas arise from the explosions of stars 8-9 times the mass of the sun. The discovery a

Heidelberg, Germany (SPX) Jul 15, 2021
An international team of astronomers, including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, have become the first in the world to detect isotopes in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. It concerns different forms of carbon in the gaseous giant planet TYC 8998-760-1 b at a distance of 300 light-years in the constellation Musca (Fly). The weak signal was measured with ESO's Very Larg