ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 19–20 August, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft first past the Moon and then past Earth itself. This ‘braking’ manoeuvre will take Juice on a shortcut to Jupiter via Venus.

As climate change drives more frequent and severe weather events, the need for accurate and timely forecasting has never been more critical. And now, the next Meteosat Third Generation weather satellite has passed its environmental test campaign with flying colours, taking it a significant step closer to launch.

Moffett Field CA (SPX) Jul 11, 2024
Anchoring the boat in a sandbar, research scientist Morgan Gilmour steps into the shallows and is immediately surrounded by sharks. The warm waters around the tropical island act as a reef shark nursery, and these baby biters are curious about the newcomer. They zoom close and veer away at the last minute, as Gilmour slowly makes her way toward the kaleidoscope of green sprouting from the island

Astana, Kazakhstan (AFP) July 11, 2024
Three EU citizens were detained this week for illegally entering the Russian-controlled Baikonur Cosmodrome in central Kazakhstan, local authorities said Thursday. The secretive space launch facility in a remote area of the Kazakh steppe has become a magnet for daredevil tourists, many of whom attempt to break into the hangars housing old Soviet-era spacecraft. The three foreigners, two

Riverside CA (SPX) July 12, 2024
Gravitational waves, ripples in space-time predicted by Einstein almost a century ago, were first detected in 2015. A new study led by Yanou Cui, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, suggests that very simple forms of matter could soon generate detectable gravitational wave backgrounds shortly after the Big Bang. "This mechanism of cre

Paris (AFP) July 11, 2024
A planet relatively close to Earth could be the first ever detected with a potentially life-sustaining liquid ocean outside our Solar System, according to scientists using the James Webb space telescope. More than 5,000 planets have been discovered outside of the Solar System so far, but only a handful are in what is called the "Goldilocks zone" - neither too hot or too cold - that could h

Houston TX (SPX) Jul 12, 2024
When the first humans travel to the Red Planet, they will need to know how to repair and maintain equipment, grow their own food, and stay healthy, all while contending with Earth-to-Mars communication delays. They must also find ways to build comradery and have fun. The first all-volunteer CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) crew accomplished all of that and more durin

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jul 11, 2024

Tyvak International SRL, a subsidiary of Terran Orbital Corporation (NYSE: LLAP) and a prominent European nano and microsatellite manufacturer, has announced that Milani has successfully passed its Qualification and Acceptance Review. Delivered in March 2024 to the European Space Agency (ESA), the satellite completed system-level testing with the Hera mothercraft at the ESA's Space Research an

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Jul 15, 2024
The Laboratory for Space Research at The University of Hong Kong (HKU-LSR) has signed a Letter of Intent (LoI) with the International Lunar Observatory Association Hawai'i (ILOA) on May 16, 2024, marking a partnership to participate in the ILOA-led Chang'e 7 lunar mission. This mission features a small, wide-field optical telescope named ILO-C. The HKU-LSR telescope design has been selected, and

London, UK (SPX) Jul 15, 2024
BAE Systems, in collaboration with L3Harris Technologies and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), has been chosen as one of three teams to develop technologies for NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). HWO is an innovative telescope designed to search for signs of life beyond our solar system and conduct detailed astronomical observations. Its primary objective is to identify and