Stacking complete for twin Space Launch System rocket boosters
Tuesday, 09 March 2021 07:10
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Stacking is complete for the twin Space Launch System (SLS) solid rocket boosters for NASA's Artemis I mission. Over several weeks, workers used one of five massive cranes to place 10 booster segments and nose assemblies on the mobile launcher inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Engineers with Exploration Ground Systems placed the first seg SpaceX plans Starlink launch, seeks approval of Internet service for vehicles
Tuesday, 09 March 2021 07:10 Write a comment
Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to launch 60 Starlink broadband Internet satellites from Florida on Tuesday, while the company seeks federal approval to beam the service to trucks, boats and aircraft around the world.
The launch is planned for 9:50 p.m. EST aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The weather is expected to be nearly perfect for la A billion years from now, a lack of oxygen will wipe out life on Earth
Tuesday, 09 March 2021 07:10 Write a comment
Earth will not be able to support and sustain life forever. Our oxygen-rich atmosphere may only last another billion years, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience.
As our Sun ages, it is becoming more luminous, meaning that in the future Earth will receive more solar energy. This increased energy will affect the surface of the planet, speeding up the weathering of silicate rocks suc How fast is the universe expanding? Galaxies provide one answer
Tuesday, 09 March 2021 07:10 Write a comment
Determining how rapidly the universe is expanding is key to understanding our cosmic fate, but with more precise data has come a conundrum: Estimates based on measurements within our local universe don't agree with extrapolations from the era shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
A new estimate of the local expansion rate - the Hubble constant, or H0 (H-naught) - reinforces th Establishing the origin of solar-mass black holes and the connection to dark matter
Tuesday, 09 March 2021 07:10 Write a comment
What is the origin of black holes and how is that question connected with another mystery, the nature of dark matter? Dark matter comprises the majority of matter in the Universe, but its nature remains unknown.
Multiple gravitational wave detections of merging black holes have been identified within the last few years by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), comm Most distant cosmic jet providing clues about early universe
Tuesday, 09 March 2021 07:10 Write a comment
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have found and studied the most distant cosmic jet discovered so far - a jet of material propelled to nearly the speed of light by the supermassive black hole in a quasar some 13 billion light-years from Earth. The quasar is seen as it was when the universe was only 780 m NASA confirms plan to fly astronaut on upcoming Soyuz mission
Tuesday, 09 March 2021 03:14 Write a comment
WASHINGTON — A NASA astronaut will fly on a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station in April, as the agency confirmed a peculiar arrangement for obtaining a seat on the Russian spacecraft.
NASA said March 9 that Mark Vande Hei will join the crew of the Soyuz MS-18 mission to the station, launching April 9.
Space Force awards ULA, SpaceX contracts for four national security missions
Monday, 08 March 2021 22:54 Write a comment
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded United Launch Alliance and SpaceX contracts for four National Security Space Launch Phase 2 missions scheduled for 2023, the Pentagon announced March 9.
ULA received $224. 2 million for two missions named USSF-112 and USSF-87.
RUAG International transforms into space-focused ‘beyond gravity’
Monday, 08 March 2021 22:41 Write a comment
TAMPA, Fla. — Swiss component maker RUAG International is shedding its military businesses to focus solely on space, transforming into a subsystems provider to be called ‘beyond gravity.’
The new company will look to invest in newspace solutions to expand internationally, with a particular focus on the U.S.
One giant step: Moon race hots up
Monday, 08 March 2021 20:50 Write a comment
As Russia and China sign a deal for a shared lunar space station, we look at the new race to the Moon with Nokia even working with NASA to give it a 4G network.
China's great leap
China's National Space Administration and Russia's Roscosmos want to build a "complex of experimental research facilities" either on the Moon or in its orbit.
President Xi Jinping has put China's "space dream" into overdrive, with a crewed space station planned for next year.
The unmanned Chang'e-4 rocket landed on the far side of the Moon in 2019, with another robot mission to the near side raising the Chinese flag there last year.
That moonshot brought rock and soil samples back to Earth in December, the first time that has been done in more than four decades.
The last lunar lander was put there by the Russians in 1976.
Russia's Luna
Moscow already has three Luna missions planned for the Moon over the next five years, mostly aimed at mining prospecting operations.
France conducts first military drills in space
Monday, 08 March 2021 17:50 Write a comment
France has begun its first military exercises in space to test its ability to defend its satellites, in a sign of the growing competition between world powers in Earth's orbit.
Michel Friedling, the head of France's newly created Space Command, called the exercises a "stress test of our systems" and said they "were a first for the French army and even a first in Europe."
Codenamed "AsterX" in a nod to the first French satellite Asterix from 1965, the drills will simulate the monitoring of a potentially dangerous space object, as well as a threat to a satellite.
"A series of events appear and create crisis situations or threats against our space infrastructure, but not only this," Friedling told reporters from the Space Command headquarters in Toulouse in southwest France.
The new US Space Force and German space agencies are taking part in the French exercises, which began on Monday and will run until Friday.
France's Space Command was announced in 2019 and is set to number 500 people by 2025.
"Our allies and adversaries are militarising space... we need to act," Defence Minister Florence Parly said at the time.
Engineers propose solar-powered lunar ark as 'modern global insurance policy'
Monday, 08 March 2021 17:34 Write a comment
University of Arizona researcher Jekan Thanga is taking scientific inspiration from an unlikely source: the biblical tale of Noah's Ark. Rather than two of every animal, however, his solar-powered ark on the moon would store cryogenically frozen seed, spore, sperm and egg samples from 6.7 million Earth species.
Thanga and a group of his undergraduate and graduate students outline the lunar ark concept, which they call a "modern global insurance policy," in a paper presented over the weekend during the IEEE Aerospace Conference.
"Earth is naturally a volatile environment," said Thanga, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering in the UArizona College of Engineering. "As humans, we had a close call about 75,000 years ago with the Toba supervolcanic eruption, which caused a 1,000-year cooling period and, according to some, aligns with an estimated drop in human diversity. Because human civilization has such a large footprint, if it were to collapse, that could have a negative cascading effect on the rest of the planet.
Op-ed | Advancing science through human-tended suborbital experiments on commercial vehicles
Monday, 08 March 2021 16:15 Write a comment
A volcanologist travels to and descends down the rim of a caldera. A geophysicist travels to and scales a glacier to drill samples. Scientists travel and work across Antarctica. A scientist studying phenomena of liquids and gases for use in the weightlessness of spaceflight sits on the ground.
New study highlights first infection of human cells during spaceflight
Monday, 08 March 2021 16:03 Write a comment
Astronauts face many challenges to their health, due to the exceptional conditions of spaceflight. Among these are a variety of infectious microbes that can attack their suppressed immune systems.
Now, in the first study of its kind, Cheryl Nickerson, lead author Jennifer Barrila and their colleagues describe the infection of human cells by the intestinal pathogen Salmonella Typhimurium during spaceflight. They show how the microgravity environment of spaceflight changes the molecular profile of human intestinal cells and how these expression patterns are further changed in response to infection. In another first, the researchers were also able to detect molecular changes in the bacterial pathogen while inside the infected host cells.
Russia and China plan joint lunar space station
Monday, 08 March 2021 15:32 Write a comment
Russia and China agreed Tuesday to build a lunar space station, as Moscow seeks to modernise its extraterrestrial might and catch up with the United States in the space race.
Russia, which sent the first man into space during the Soviet Union, has been lagging behind Washington and Beijing in the exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Russia's space agency Roscosmos said in a statement that a memorandum was signed by its head Dmitry Rogozin and Zhang Kejian of China's National Space Administration (CNSA).
It said the lunar station will be designed as a "complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon".
It would be available for use by other interested countries and international partners, the statement said, without details about the completion date.
Despite its former Soviet glory, Russia's space sector has suffered greatly in recent years from a lack of financing and corruption.
Moscow and Washington are collaborating in the space sector—one of the few areas of cooperation left between the Cold War rivals.
Russia last year lost its monopoly for manned flights to the International Space Station (ISS) after the first succesful mission of the US company Space X.