Houston (AFP) Aug 24, 2024
Two US astronauts who arrived at the International Space Station aboard Boeing's Starliner will have to stay six more months and return home with rival SpaceX, NASA said Saturday, in a fresh public relations blow to the crisis-hit aviation giant. The return of Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams had already been delayed for weeks by thruster malfunctions of the Boeing spacecraft

Washington (AFP) Aug 24, 2024
SpaceX is coming to Boeing's rescue. The legacy company needing aid from an upstart rival is hardly welcome news to the aerospace giant. Because of problems with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, two astronauts who rode on it to the International Space Station in June will finally return to Earth on a vessel built by Elon Musk's SpaceX. NASA's announcement Saturday of that plan represe

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
The violent collapse of massive, rapidly spinning stars could generate detectable gravitational waves, according to new research published in 'The Astrophysical Journal Letters'. Scientists suggest that these waves, resulting from collapsing stars known as collapsars, are just waiting to be discovered by current observatories. These gravitational waves are produced when stars, 15 to 20 tim

London, UK (SPX) Aug 26, 2024
A team of researchers has identified a rare binary star system, estimated to be around 10 billion years old, that has traveled from the remote regions of the Milky Way's halo to our local stellar neighborhood. The international team, including experts from the University of Hertfordshire, the UK, Spain, and China, made the discovery while examining stars near Earth. They identified a pair

Paris, France (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
The third European Service Module (ESM-3) for NASA's Orion spacecraft has departed from Airbus' Bremen, Germany, facilities, bound for Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This module will be integrated with the Crew Module in preparation for the Artemis III mission, which will see astronauts return to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Constructed by Air

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
A global team of 45 scientists studying meteor showers has uncovered that comets break apart in different ways when nearing the Sun, with these variations tied to the environments where the comets initially formed 4.5 billion years ago. The findings, recently published in the journal 'Icarus', suggest that these differences in comet disintegration are influenced by the conditions in the protopla

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 26, 2024
A recent study reveals that NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft, which collided with the asteroid moon Dimorphos in 2022, permanently altered both its shape and its orbit. The impact deformed Dimorphos, creating a large crater and reshaping it to the extent that it disrupted the moon's natural evolutionary trajectory. Researchers now believe that Dimorphos might start "tumb

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Aug 26, 2024
Researchers have pinpointed a range of materials, including specific plastics, rubber, synthetic fibers, and Martian soil (regolith), as effective options for shielding astronauts from harmful space radiation on Mars. These insights are critical for developing protective habitats and spacesuits, paving the way for extended Mars missions. The thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field on Mars l

Huntsville AL (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
Winning the 2024 Human Rover Explorer Challenge (HERC) provided an engineering student team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of the University of Alabama System, the opportunity to perform STEM outreach in the Dominican Republic (DR) this summer. UAH rover team THESEUS members traveled to the DR capital to give presentations to attendees at the Instituto Tecnologico de Sa

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Aug 23, 2024
Water is vital for human survival on the lunar surface, making it a significant focus of research. A team led by Prof. WANG Junqiang at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has introduced a novel approach to generate substantial amounts of water through a reaction between lunar regolith and endogenous hydrogen. Findin