ESA has successfully operated a spacecraft with Europe's next-generation mission control system for the first time. The powerful software, named the "European Ground System—Common Core' (EGS-CC), will be the 'brain' of all European spaceflight operations in the years to come, and promises new possibilities for how future missions will fly.

Future rockets could fly with tanks made of lightweight carbon fiber reinforced plastic thanks to ground-breaking research carried out within ESA's Future Launchers Preparatory Program.

Building on earlier studies, MT Aerospace in Germany has demonstrated a novel design of a small scale tank made of a unique carbon-fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) that is not only leak-proof with liquid hydrogen, but also compatible with liquid oxygen, without the use of a metal liner.

Machine learning is coming for astronomy. But that doesn't mean astronomers and citizen scientists are obsolete. In fact, it may mean exactly the opposite.

When you think of a galaxy, the first thing that comes to mind is a spiral. There's a dense cluster of stars in the core and some big, sweeping spiral arms out to the side.

But that's not the only kind of galaxy out there. Like people, galaxies come in all shapes and sizes. There's disk shaped ones and spherical ones, neat barred spirals and messy irregulars.

Galaxies, sorted

That shape isn't just important for your sense of aesthetics when you're picking a desktop wallpaper. It also tells us a whole lot about the universe, according to Mitchell Cavanagh, Ph.D. candidate at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

"We call ellipticals early types because they're more prominent as you go out to higher redshifts in the earlier universe. Then your spirals, we tend to call late type because they're more common when we look at the more-recent universe at lower redshift galaxies close to us," Mitchell says.