Washington DC (UPI) Jul 30, 2025
NASA is preparing for its April 2026 Artemis II 10-day mission that will send a crew of four around the moon to prepare for future crewed moon landings. The Artemis II mission will demonstrate a variety of capabilities that are needed to complete deep-space missions, including those to the moon and Mars, the space agency said. The Artemis II crew is comprised of mission commander

San Diego CA (SPX) Jul 30, 2025
Esri has partnered with Microsoft and Space42 to launch the Map Africa Initiative, a five-year project aimed at building the most detailed and scalable geospatial basemap of Africa to date. The effort, formalized at the 2025 Esri User Conference, will span all 54 African nations and provide high-resolution mapping data intended to support over 1.4 billion people. Many African nations lack

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jul 30, 2025
Scientists have found a new way to probe the composition of Earth's ancient atmosphere by studying fossilized cosmic dust. An international team led by the University of Gottingen, with collaborators from the Open University, University of Pisa, and Leibniz University Hannover, developed a technique to analyze micrometeorites - tiny metal-rich particles from space that have been preserved in Ear

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jul 30, 2025
Spire Global has secured a new contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to deliver satellite-derived weather data under ESA's Third Party Mission (TPM) programme. The agreement grants European scientists access to Spire's extensive historical Earth observation datasets. The data, gathered from Spire's constellation of satellites, includes GNSS-Reflectometry and Polarimetric Radio Occu

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jul 30, 2025
SFL Missions Inc. has secured a contract from the Norwegian Space Agency (NOSA) to develop AISSat-4, a ship-tracking nanosatellite scheduled for launch within a year. The mission aims to bolster Norway's maritime monitoring network by adding capacity as current satellites approach the end of their service lives. Built on SFL's proven SPARTAN 6U platform, AISSat-4 will carry a single Automa

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jul 30, 2025
BlackSky Technology Inc. (NYSE: BKSY) has been awarded the next phase of a U.S. Navy research contract aimed at advancing optical inter-satellite link (OISL) technology for its next-generation Gen-3 satellite constellation. The goal is to enable faster and more secure in-space data transmission, particularly for high-resolution imagery and large volumes of intelligence data, before reaching grou

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jul 30, 2025
The Boeing-built X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) is scheduled to embark on its eighth mission, OTV-8, no earlier than August 21 from Florida's Space Coast. This marks the next phase of operations for the uncrewed spaceplane, coming less than six months after OTV-7 successfully concluded. According to Michelle Parker, vice president of Boeing Space Mission Systems, the program continues to

Washington DC (UPI) Jul 31, 2025
The U.S. Defense Department won't end the dispersal of key satellite weather data on Friday as planned. One month ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published a notice about the change by the U.S. Navy, effective July 1. Then NOAA said the change would be delayed by one month until Thursday. In an update posted Wednesday, the phase-out plans were pushed back

Washington (AFP) July 30, 2025
A formidable new radar satellite jointly developed by the United States and India launched Wednesday, designed to track subtle changes in Earth's land and ice surfaces and help predict both natural and human-caused hazards. Dubbed NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), the pickup truck-sized spacecraft blasted off around 5:40 pm (1210 GMT) from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India's

Europe’s forests play a crucial role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but research led by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has found their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide has declined in the past decade.