Copernical Team
DARPA awards 3 deals for work on nuclear propulsion system
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded three contracts this week to design a nuclear thermal propulsion system that will operate above low Earth orbit in 2025.
General Atomics, Blue Origin, and Lockheed Martin are the prime contractors for the deal, according to a DARPA press release.
The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program has the po Two Russian cosmonauts, NASA astronaut return from ISS
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Two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut touched down Saturday on the steppe of Kazakhstan following a half-year mission on the International Space Station, footage broadcast by the Russian space agency showed.
Russia's Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov as well as NASA's Kate Rubins landed on barren land at 0455 GMT around 150 kilometres (90 miles) southeast of the town of Zhezkazg SpaceX's next crew arrives in Florida for Earth Day launch
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SpaceX's most international crew of astronauts yet arrived at their launch site Friday.
By coincidence, their flight to the International Space Station is set for next Thursday—Earth Day. It's a reminder of NASA's core mission of studying the home planet, the space agency's acting administrator Steve Jurczyk said as he welcomed the astronauts to Kennedy Space Center.
NASA chooses SpaceX to take humans back to Moon
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NASA has selected SpaceX to land the first astronauts on the surface of the Moon since 1972, the agency said Friday, in a huge victory for Elon Musk's company.
The contract, worth $2.9 billion, involves the prototype Starship spacecraft that is being tested at SpaceX's south Texas facility.
"Today I'm very excited, and we are all very excited to announce that we have awarded SpaceX t NASA rocket to survey the solar system's windshield
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Eleven billion miles away—more than four times the distance from us to Pluto—lies the boundary of our solar system's magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun's magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible cobweb, fizzles to nothing. Interstellar space begins.
"It's really the largest boundary of its kind we can study," said Walt Harris, space physicist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
We still know little about what lies beyond this boundary. Fortunately, bits of interstellar space can come to us, passing right through this border and making their way into the solar system.
A new NASA mission will study light from interstellar particles that have drifted into our solar system to learn about the closest reaches of interstellar space.
Week in images: 12 - 16 April 2021
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Week in images: 12 - 16 April 2021
Discover our week through the lens
Astronaut selection: tips from Thomas
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Video:
00:02:18
In 2008, Thomas Pesquet applied to become an ESA astronaut. On 22 April 2021, he will fly his second mission to the International Space Station. In this video Thomas shares how he found his way to space, and encourages viewers to follow their passions as ESA seeks its next class of astronauts.
Nobody is perfect on their first attempt at a task, but Thomas says the only way to improve is to try and keep trying. Though becoming an astronaut seemed a distant dream when he was younger, by continuing to challenge himself and learn along the way
Science Marches on: International Space Station update
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The first quarter of 2021 flew by almost as fast as the International Space Station itself. Get up to speed with some March highlights from our orbital outpost as an astronaut prepares to be launched into space on a Dragon.
Astronauts need a fridge
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For astronauts to go on long missions to the moon or Mars, they need a refrigerator. But today's fridges aren't designed to work in zero gravity - or upside down if oriented that way when a spacecraft lands on another planet.
A team of engineers from Purdue University, Air Squared Inc., and Whirlpool Corporation is working on building a fridge for zero gravity that operates in different or Fast-spinning black holes narrow the search for dark matter particles
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Ultralight bosons are hypothetical particles whose mass is predicted to be less than a billionth the mass of an electron. They interact relatively little with their surroundings and have thus far eluded searches to confirm their existence. If they exist, ultralight bosons such as axions would likely be a form of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85 percent of the matter 
