Istanbul (AFP) Jan 17, 2024
When Turkey's first astronaut blasts off for the International Space Station (ISS) this week, he will embody his country's pride and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's grand geopolitical ambitions. Alper Gezeravci, a 43-year-old fighter pilot and colonel in Turkey's air force, was due to take off Wednesday from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for a two-week mission. But l

Beijing (XNA) Jan 18, 2024
China's Tianzhou 7 cargo spacecraft has successfully completed its journey to the Tiangong space station, docking without any issues. Launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, Tianzhou 7, aboard a Long March 7 rocket, lifted off at 10:27 pm. The launch was a spectacle of precision and technological prowess, as the rocket placed Tianzhou 7 into its designated low-Earth or

Kennedy Space Center, United States (AFP) Jan 17, 2024
An all-European crew including Turkey's first astronaut are poised to blast off to the International Space Station in a mission with Axiom Space, as countries hungry for a taste of space turn increasingly to the private sector. The launch, Axiom's third, is scheduled to see the four-member crew lift off in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule fixed to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket at 4:49 pm local ti

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 18, 2024
NASA's innovative approach to building large-scale infrastructure in space has reached a new milestone with the Automated Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive Digital Assembly Systems (ARMADAS). This cutting-edge project, developed by a dedicated team at NASA's Ames Research Center, is geared towards meeting the critical needs of future long-duration and deep-space missions. Christine Gregg, th

St. Louis, MO (SPX) Jan 18, 2024
Eighteen years after NASA's Stardust mission returned to Earth with the first samples from a known comet, the true nature of that icy object is coming into focus. Stardust collected material from Wild 2, a comet that likely formed beyond Neptune and currently orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Painstaking analyses of the microscopic samples, recently described in the journal Geochemi

Washington DC (UPI) Jan 17, 2024
The SpaceX launch of the private Axiom-3 mission to the International Space Station was scrubbed until Thursday, the company said on social media just before noon on Wednesday. The flight, the third private industry flight carrying four astronauts the orbiting laboratory was scheduled to blast off late Wednesday afternoon. "Now targeting Thursday, Jan. 18 for [the] launch of the

Image: Heart of ESA vacuum testing

Windswept piles of dust, or layers of ice? ESA’s Mars Express has revisited one of Mars’s most mysterious features to clarify its composition. Its findings suggest layers of water ice stretching several kilometres below ground – the most water ever found in this part of the planet.

Video: 00:01:15

ESA astronaut and commander of Expedition 70 Andreas Mogensen has some advice for Marcus Wandt, ESA’s first project astronaut, who will join him on the International Space Station on his Muninn mission. It will be the first time two Scandinavians are in space together, which fits perfectly with their mission names, Huginn and Muninn.

Golden CO (SPX) Jan 17, 2024
Nearly 75 percent of the U.S. could experience damaging earthquake shaking, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey-led team of 50+ scientists and engineers. This was one of several key findings from the latest USGS National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM). The model was used to create a color-coded map that pinpoints where damaging earthquakes are most likely to occur based on insights from se