Image: As the holiday season swiftly approaches, frosty landscapes tend to be associated with the magical idea of a white Christmas. But this Copernicus Sentinel-3 image over the Antarctica Peninsula sheds light on a different perspective.

Image: Dragon rider

Beijing (AFP) Dec 14, 2023
When Chang'e-3 became the first Chinese craft to land on the Moon 10 years ago, it kicked off nationwide celebrations - and a decade of major successes for a rapidly accelerating space programme. Since the December 14, 2013 landing, China has built a crewed space station, sent a robotic rover to Mars and become the first nation to make a controlled landing on the far side of the Moon. P

Boston MA (SPX) Dec 14, 2023
Peat bogs in the tropics store vast amounts of carbon, but logging, plantations, road building, and other activities have destroyed large swaths of these ecosystems in places like Indonesia and Malaysia. Peat formations are essentially permanently flooded forestland, where dead leaves and branches accumulate because the water table prevents their decomposition. The pileup of organic materi

Beijing, China (SPX) Dec 14, 2023
Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, or the "China Sky Eye," a team of Chinese astronomers built the largest-ever high-quality catalog of neutral hydrogen (HI) sources beyond our Galaxy. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is a key component of galaxies. Within disk galaxies, the HI is a significant component of the interstellar medium. Th

Paris (ESA) Dec 14, 2023
Milani needs you! This is your chance to design a mission patch for the Milani CubeSat which will fly with ESA's Hera planetary defence spacecraft to the Didymos binary asteroid system. ESA is offering graphic designers and artists a unique opportunity to feature their work on the Milani CubeSat's mission patch. This competition is an exciting opportunity for students of graphic art or des

Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 14, 2023
A NASA study expands the search for life beyond our solar system by indicating that 17 exoplanets (worlds outside our solar system) could have oceans of liquid water, an essential ingredient for life, beneath icy shells. Water from these oceans could occasionally erupt through the ice crust as geysers. The science team calculated the amount of geyser activity on these exoplanets, the first time

Pasadena CA (JPL) Dec 14, 2023
NASA's NEOWISE has had a busy decade. Since its reactivated mission began on Dec. 13, 2013, the space telescope has discovered a once-in-a-lifetime comet, observed more than 3,000 near-Earth objects, bolstered international planetary defense strategies, and supported another NASA mission's rendezvous with a distant asteroid. And that's just a partial list of accomplishments. But all good t

Strasbourg, France (SPX) Dec 14, 2023
A new set of tools for astronomers and planetary explorers use interactive visual analytics and machine learning to reveal and contrast properties of objects in our galaxy. From identifying the 'weirdest' outliers in a population of stars to creating maps of the dusty Milky Way, or combining datasets for an immersive exploration of the lunar surface, the open-source tools are designed to help as

Melbourne, Australia (SPX) Dec 14, 2023
The year 2023 proved a big one for lunar science. India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft landed near the south pole of the Moon, a huge accomplishment for a country relatively new to the space scene, especially after its Chandrayaan-2 craft crashed in 2019. At the same time, NASA's been gearing up for a host of Moon-related missions, including its Artemis program. In 2023, the agency gained nine