Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jul 08, 2021
From above, the Antarctic Ice Sheet might look like a calm, perpetual ice blanket that has covered Antarctica for millions of years. But the ice sheet can be thousands of meters deep at its thickest, and it hides hundreds of meltwater lakes where its base meets the continent's bedrock. Deep below the surface, some of these lakes fill and drain continuously through a system of waterways that even

Santa Cruz CA (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
Many exoplanets have opaque atmospheres, obscured by clouds or hazes that make it hard for astronomers to characterize their chemical compositions. A new study shows that haze particles produced under different conditions have a wide range of properties that can determine how clear or hazy a planet's atmosphere is likely to be. Photochemical reactions in the atmospheres of temperate exopla

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
Thanks to data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international collaboration of astronomers has identified four exoplanets, worlds beyond our solar system, orbiting a pair of related young stars called TOI 2076 and TOI 1807. These worlds may provide scientists with a glimpse of a little-understood stage of planetary evolution. "The planets in both systems a

Beijing (XNA) Jul 14, 2021
China on Monday delivered about 17 grams of lunar samples brought back by the Chang'e-5 probe to 13 institutions, which had applied for research programs to the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration. Speaking at a ceremony to mark the delivery, Liu Jizhong, director of the center, said that this is the first batch of lunar samples delivered t

Beijing, China (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
China announced Friday that the Chang'e-4 mission, which realized the first-ever soft-landing on the far side of the moon, was a complete success. With the assistance of the relay satellite Queqiao (Magpie Bridge), the rover Yutu-2 (Jade Rabbit-2) and the lander of the Chang'e-4 probe took photos of each other. The scientific instruments aboard the probe worked well, and the images t

Copenhagen, Denmark (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
In the vicinity of black holes, space is so warped that even light rays may curve around them several times. This phenomenon may enable us to see multiple versions of the same thing. While this has been known for decades, only now do we have an exact, mathematical expression, thanks to Albert Sneppen, student at the Niels Bohr Institute. The result, which even is more useful in realistic black h

Huntsville AL (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
NASA's Near-Earth Asteroid Scout is tucked away safely inside the agency's powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The solar sailing CubeSat is one of several secondary payloads hitching a ride on Artemis I, the first integrated flight of the agency's SLS and the Orion spacecraft. NEA Scout, a small spacecraft roughly the size of a large shoebox

Moscow (Sputnik) Jul 14, 2021
The rover, named after the Chinese god of fire, is being used by the Chinese agency to examine Martian soil and atmosphere, take pictures, create maps, and search for water and evidence of past life. The rover is equipped with a variety of equipment and can communicate with Earth via the Tianwen-1 orbiter's "high-speed data relay." The China National Space Administration released five new

Beijing, China (SPX) Jul 14, 2021
China's first meteorological satellite launched in 1988. It was named Fengyun, which roughly translates to "wind and cloud". Since then, 17 more Fengyun meteorological satellites were launched, with seven still in operation, to monitor Earth's wind, clouds and, more recently, extreme weather events such as hurricanes and wildfires. With more than 30 years of Earth observational data freely

Washington DC (SPX) Jul 13, 2021
The Missile Defense Agency deployed two tiny satellites to space June 30 that successfully began communicating with ground stations over the Fourth of July weekend, the first step on the way to an experiment that will eventually see them communicate with each other, a feat that could play a major role in the development of U.S. missile defense technology. The CubeSat Networked Communicatio