Brisbane, Australia (SPX) Oct 01, 2025
QUT's Centre for Robotics will play a central role in keeping Australia's first lunar rover, known as Roo-ver, safely on course during its mission to the Moon. Professor Michael Milford, Director of the Centre, said the team was thrilled to contribute to the ambitious project. "Obviously, the Moon presents an environment unlike anywhere on Earth," he said. "QUT's world-class robotics exper

Paris, France (SPX) Oct 01, 2025
ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has captured the most detailed view yet of Mars's atmosphere, showing a fine layering of dust and ice particles that resembles a cosmic mille-feuille. The images reveal a delicate stratification extending from the surface up to 55 km in altitude, shedding light on processes shaping the Red Planet's restless skies. The data were obtained on January 21, 2024,

Paris, France (SPX) Oct 01, 2025
Scientists using the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope have discovered a vast stellar wave rippling across the Milky Way's disc, extending tens of thousands of light-years from the Sun. The finding adds to Gaia's record of uncovering the galaxy's dynamic structure, following its earlier identification of the disc's rotation, warp, and wobble. Like ripples spreading from a rock cast in

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Oct 09, 2025
New analyses of the South Pole-Aitken basin recast the formation of the Moon's largest impact crater and what it reveals about lunar origins. Led by University of Arizona planetary scientist Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, the study in Nature outlines how the basin's geometry and chemistry point to a northward-moving impactor and a radioactive-rich ejecta deposit. Spanning more than 1,200 miles nor

Paris (AFP) Oct 10, 2025
Europe must quickly get its own reusable rocket launcher to catch up to billionaire Elon Musk's dominant SpaceX, European Space Agency director Josef Aschbacher told AFP in an interview. While the US company has an overwhelming lead in the booming space launch industry, a series of setbacks, including Russia's withdrawal of its rockets, left Europe without an independent way to blast its mis

The European Space Agency’s upcoming FORUM mission is set to provide unique insights into Earth’s radiation budget, filling in a missing piece in the climate puzzle. The mission’s spectrometer will be the first space-based instrument to measure Earth’s outgoing radiation in the far-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum with unprecedented resolution and accuracy. New technologies were needed to make this possible – among these an on-ground calibration device developed by the National Metrology Institute of Germany PTB within a recent activity funded by ESA’s General Support Technology Programme. This device is used

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Oct 09, 2025
A fragment of ancient ice and dust from another star system has arrived in our cosmic neighborhood as 3I/ATLAS, only the third interstellar comet ever found. Using NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, Auburn University physicists detected hydroxyl gas, the ultraviolet by-product of water, confirming active water release from this visitor. Swift's vantage point above Earth's atmosphere en

London, UK (SPX) Oct 09, 2025
A study co-led by the University of Oxford, Google Cloud and Radboud University shows a general-purpose large language model, Google's Gemini, can identify real celestial changes and explain its reasoning using only 15 example image triplets and brief instructions, achieving about 93% accuracy across ATLAS, MeerLICHT and Pan-STARRS alerts. The workflow ingests New, Reference and Difference