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Ten years ago, on 19 December 2013, ESA’s billion star-mapping satellite Gaia launched. Since then, Gaia has been scanning the sky and gathering an enormous amount of data on the positions and motions of 1.8 billion stars, enabling numerous discoveries about the history of our galaxy.

Gaia’s catalogue is ever-growing containing data on stars and other cosmic objects such as asteroids in our Solar System, exoplanets, binary stars, and other galaxies. The Gaia collaboration, consisting of about 450 people in 25 countries, prepares the data for scientific use. This has resulted in publications of over 10 000 scientific papers

Image: Hera’s wings of power

Space Coast FL (SPX) Dec 19, 2023
2023 has been the busiest year for spaceports around the world. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launches a batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on December 18 at 11:01 p.m. EST (0401 UTC Dec. 19). A stormy weather that swept through Florida last week delayed the first launch attempt at the T-1 minute mark due to high ground-level winds, and h

Washington (AFP) Dec 19, 2023
NASA on Monday announced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth - to send a high-definition cat video. The 15-second meow-vie featuring an orange tabby named Taters is the first to be streamed from deep space, and demonstrates it's possible to transmit the higher-data-rate communications needed to sup

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Dec 19, 2023
On a vast ice sheet in Antarctica, scientists and engineers are preparing a NASA experiment called GUSTO to explore the universe on a balloon. GUSTO will launch from the Ross Ice Shelf, near the U.S. National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station research base, no earlier than Dec. 21. GUSTO, which stands for Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory, will peer into th

Geneva, Switzerland (SPX) Dec 19, 2023
A recent study by a team of astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with CNRS laboratories in Paris and Bordeaux, has successfully simulated the entire runaway greenhouse process, marking a significant advancement in understanding planetary climates. This process, which can dramatically transform a planet's climate from conducive to life to extremely hostile, has been

Washington DC (UPI) Dec 18, 2023
Blue Origin has scrubbed its first flight since last year's uncrewed booster mishap. Monday's launch in West Texas was called off earlier in the day, first for cold weather and then due to an unspecified "ground system issue." "We're scrubbing #NS24 today due to a ground system issue the team is troubleshooting. We'll provide a new launch target for this week soon," Blue Origin revealed

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 19, 2023
Lynk Global, Inc., a leader in satellite-to-phone communications, and Slam Corp. (NASDAQ: SLAM), a special purpose acquisition company, have embarked on a significant step towards merging. The two companies have signed a non-binding letter of intent (LOI) for a potential business combination. This move, once finalized, is set to list Lynk Global, Inc. as a publicly-traded entity under the ticker

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Dec 19, 2023
In a groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications, an international team from Wits University and ICFO- The Institute of Photonic Sciences has unveiled a novel technique for transporting patterns of light, akin to image teleportation, across a network without the physical transmission of the image itself. This research not only challenges our conventional understanding of data transfe