Copernical Team
NASA, SpaceX Sign Joint Spaceflight Safety Agreement
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NASA and SpaceX have signed a joint agreement to formalize both parties' strong interest in the sharing of information to maintain and improve space safety. This agreement enables a deeper level of coordination, cooperation, and data sharing, and defines the arrangement, responsibilities, and procedures for flight safety coordination.
The focus of the agreement is on conjunction avoidance NASA testing giant rocket for next Moon mission
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NASA was preparing for a key static test of its troubled Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on Thursday as the agency prepares to return to the Moon.
The second "hot fire" test will see all four of the rocket's RS-25 engines fire simultaneously and achieve a maximum of 1.6 million pounds of thrust (7.1 million newtons).
A two-hour window for the test began at 3:00 pm Eastern time (1900 GMT). At around 4:00pm, NASA said the text was expected within 45 minutes.
It will be the second such test involving the 212-foot (65-meter) high core stage at the Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, after the first was cut short in January.
For some scientists, Mars 2020 is a mission of perseverance
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Intern develops software for ESA space experiment
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A student interning at ESA will soon see her work launched into space. Meadhbh Griffin of University College Dublin has spent the last five months writing and testing software for an experiment set to fly later this year on the Hungarian-led RadCube CubeSat. While its main mission is to probe space weather in Earth orbit, RadCube will also host a miniature experiment to test how commercial computer memories withstand space radiation.
Galileo will help Lunar Pathfinder navigate around Moon
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ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder mission to the Moon will carry an advanced satellite navigation receiver, in order to perform the first ever satnav positioning fix in lunar orbit. This experimental payload marks a preliminary step in an ambitious ESA plan to expand reliable satnav coverage – as well as communication links – to explorers around and ultimately on the Moon during this decade.
ESA's technical heart
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ESA's technical heart New podcast episode: Columbus' launch to orbit
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The latest episode of ESA Explores podcast series ‘Time and Space’ series is out now, with a focus on the launch of Europe’s Columbus laboratory.
Perseverance rover captures the sounds of driving on Mars
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NASA's newest rover recorded audio of itself crunching over the surface of the Red Planet, adding a whole new dimension to Mars exploration.
As the Perseverance rover began to make tracks on the surface of Mars, a sensitive microphone it carries scored a first: the bangs, pings, and rattles of the robot's six wheels as they rolled over Martian terrain.
"A lot of people, when they see the images, don't appreciate that the wheels are metal," said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
A brighter future for gravitational-wave astronomy
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Future gravitational-wave detectors on Earth will use laser light with even higher power than in current instruments. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH), and Leibniz University Hannover have now developed a new laser system for this purpose.
They combined the custom tailored light from Missing baryons found in far-out reaches of galactic halos
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Researchers have channeled the universe's earliest light - a relic of the universe's formation known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - to solve a missing-matter mystery and learn new things about galaxy formation. Their work could also help us to better understand dark energy and test Einstein's theory of general relativity by providing new details about the rate at which galaxies are m