...the who's who,
and the what's what 
of the space industry

Space Careers

news Space News

Cultivating plant growth in space

Wednesday, 13 January 2021 06:00
Write a comment
Urbana IL (SPX) Jan 12, 2021
When in space, astronauts typically eat dehydrated, nutrient-dense food, but when it comes to longer space missions, that can become a problem as they'll eventually lack nutrients from fresh vegetables. However, one chemical and biomolecular engineering professor will be researching ways astronauts can grow their own fresh vegetables more efficiently while they are on missions. Ying Diao w
Write a comment
Washington DC (SPX) Jan 12, 2021
Linear accelerators, LINACs for short, are devices that accelerate electrons or other sub-atomic particles along a straight line to generate a beam of high energy. LINACs have a variety of commercial uses such as generating X-rays for cargo inspection, medical diagnostics, food sterilization, and even enabling precise external radiation treatments to destroy cancer cells without damaging surroun
Write a comment
Washington DC (UPI) Jan 11, 2021
The U.S. departments of Defense and Commerce will jointly seek public input on development of 5G communication networks, they announced on Monday. 5G, or fifth generation telecommunications standard for broadband cellular networks, offers higher download speeds and has been of particular interest to the U.S. military prior to its civilian rollout in 2019. The Defense Department r
Write a comment
Maunakea HI (SPX) Jan 13, 2021
The most distant quasar known has been discovered. The quasar, seen just 670 million years after the Big Bang, is 1000 times more luminous than the Milky Way, and is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which weighs in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Seen more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discover
Write a comment
Columbus OH (SPX) Jan 13, 2021
You've heard of Old Faithful, the Yellowstone National Park geyser that erupts every hour or two, a geological phenomenon on a nearly predictable schedule. Now, an international group of scientists who study space have discovered an astronomical "Old Faithful" - an eruption of light flashing about once every 114 days on a nearly predictable schedule. The researchers believe it is a tidal d
Write a comment
Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 12, 2021
Through the centuries, scientists and non-scientists alike have looked at the night sky and felt excitement, intrigue, and overwhelming mystery while pondering questions about how our universe came to be, and how humanity developed and thrived in this exact place and time. Early astronomers painstakingly studied stars' subtle movements in the night sky to try and determine how our planet moves i
Write a comment
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Jan 13, 2021
During a typical year, over a million people visit Yellowstone National Park, where the Old Faithful geyser regularly blasts a jet of boiling water high in the air. Now, an international team of astronomers has discovered a cosmic equivalent, a distant galaxy that erupts roughly every 114 days. Using data from facilities including NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Transiting Exopla

Galaxy mergers could limit star formation

Wednesday, 13 January 2021 06:00
Write a comment
Durham UK (SPX) Jan 12, 2021
Our astronomers have looked nine billion years into the past to find evidence that galaxy mergers in the early universe could shut down star formation and affect galaxy growth. Using a powerful Earth-based telescope they saw that a huge amount of star-forming gas was ejected into the universe by the coming together of two galaxies. The merger created a new galaxy called ID2299 at a t
Write a comment
Munich, Germany (ESA) Jan 11, 2021
To celebrate a new year, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has published a montage of six beautiful galaxy mergers. Each of these merging systems was studied as part of the recent HiPEEC survey to investigate the rate of new star formation within such systems. These interactions are a key aspect of galaxy evolution and are among the most spectacular events in the lifetime of a galaxy. It
Write a comment
Washington DC (UPI) Jan 7, 2021
The brown dwarf closest to our solar system hosts wind bands and jet streams, according to new analysis of the object's atmosphere. Brown dwarfs are too big to be planets but not quite massive enough to generate fusion, a prerequisite for stellar classification. Though hot in their infancy, brown dwarfs steadily cool as they mature, making them difficult to spot and study. Becaus

Chandra Studies Extraordinary Magnetar

Wednesday, 13 January 2021 06:00
Write a comment
Huntsville AL (SPX) Jan 11, 2021
In 2020, astronomers added a new member to an exclusive family of exotic objects with the discovery of a magnetar. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory help support the idea that it is also a pulsar, meaning it emits regular pulses of light. Magnetars are a type of neutron star, an incredibly dense object mainly made up of tightly packed neutron, which forms from the coll
Write a comment
Trieste, Italy (SPX) Jan 12, 2021
Two billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was still very young. However, thousands of huge galaxies, rich in stars and dust, were already formed. An international study, led by SISSA - Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, now explains how this was possible. Scientists combined observational and theoretical methods to identify the physical processes behind their evolu
Write a comment
Intuitive Machines lander

WASHINGTON — SpaceX secured contracts Jan. 13 for the launches of a commercial lunar lander mission backed by NASA as well as a privately funded satellite to track methane emissions.

Intuitive Machines announced that it selected SpaceX for the launch of its IM-2 lunar lander mission on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than 2022.

Write a comment

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, was picked as the future location of U.S. Space Command’s headquarters.

Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett announced the decision Jan. 13.

The selection of Redstone Arsenal is a huge win for Huntsville, nicknamed “Rocket City.

Write a comment
A robot made of ice could adapt and repair itself on other worlds
The IceBot is just a concept right now, with some structural parts made of ice. Credit: GRASP Lab

Some of the most tantalizing targets in space exploration are frozen ice worlds. Take Jupiter's moon Europa, for instance. Its warm, salty subsurface ocean is buried under a moon-wide sheet of ice. What's the best way to explore it?

Maybe an ice could play a role.

Though the world's space agencies—especially NASA—are getting better and better at building robots to explore places like Mars, those robots have limitations. Perhaps chief among those limitations is the possibility of breakdown. Once a rover on Mars—or somewhere even more distant—breaks down, it's game over. There's no feasible way to repair something like MSL Curiosity if it breaks down while exploring the Martian surface.

But what if the world being explored was a frozen one, and the robot was made of ice? Could icy robots perform self-repair, even in a limited fashion? Could they actually be manufactured and assembled there, even partly?

Page 1811 of 1846