Washington (AFP) Sept 7, 2024
Boeing's beleaguered Starliner made its long-awaited return to Earth on Saturday without the astronauts who rode it up to the International Space Station, after NASA ruled the trip back too risky. After years of delays, Starliner launched in June for what was meant to be a roughly weeklong test mission - a final shakedown before it could be certified to rotate crew to and from the orbital l

Week in images: 02-06 September 2024

Discover our week through the lens

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Sep 06, 2024
A research team led by Lund University in Sweden has identified an exoplanet exhibiting peculiar orbital movement, challenging current understandings of planetary system dynamics. This newly discovered planet, TOI-1408c, located 455 light-years away, appears to be involved in complex interactions with its larger neighbor, TOI-1408b, a hot gas giant. TOI-1408c, with a mass approximately eig

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Sep 06, 2024
An international group of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the PlanetS National Centre of Competence in Research, has uncovered the presence of iron winds in the atmosphere of the ultra-hot Jupiter, WASP-76 b. This planet, with temperatures soaring beyond 2000 degrees Celsius, has been a focal point for scientists as they explore the extreme atmospheri

Boulder CO (SPX) Sep 05, 2024
Scientists have traveled to the edges of the solar system, virtually, at least, to capture the most accurate measurements to date of the faint glow that permeates the universe-a phenomenon known as the cosmic optical background. The new study, published Aug. 28 in The Astrophysical Journal, draws on observations from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which whizzed past Pluto in 2015 and is n

Paris, France (SPX) Sep 06, 2024
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission successfully carried out its fourth of six gravity assist flybys at Mercury, capturing critical data and views of two distinct impact craters. These flybys utilize Mercury's gravity to steer the spacecraft for its final arrival in orbit around the planet in November 2026. The closest approach occurred on 4 September 2024 at 23:48 CEST (21:48 UTC), with Bepi

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite captured this image over Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 2 September, just ahead of the Sentinel-2C launch.

In 2022 NASA’s DART spacecraft made history, and changed the Solar System forever, by impacting the Dimorphos asteroid and measurably shifting its orbit around the larger Didymos asteroid. In the process a plume of debris was thrown out into space.

The latest modelling, available on the preprint server arXiv and accepted for publication in the September volume of The Planetary Science Journal, shows how small meteoroids from that debris could eventually reach both Mars and Earth – potentially in an observable (although quite safe) manner.

Video: 00:01:00

Rover trials in a quarry in the UK showing a four-wheeled rover, known as Codi, using its robotic arm and a powerful computer vision system to pick up sample tubes. 

The rover drives to the samples with an accuracy of 10cm, constantly mapping the terrain. Codi uses its arm and four cameras to locate the sample tube, retrieve it and safely store it on the rover – all of it without human intervention. At every stop, the rover uses stereo cameras to build up a 180-degree map of the surroundings and plan its next maneouvres. Once parked, the camera

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Sep 05, 2024
Around 4 billion years ago, an asteroid struck Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, leading to a significant shift in its axis. A researcher from Kobe University has recently confirmed that this impact was caused by an asteroid approximately 20 times larger than the one responsible for the extinction event that ended the age of the dinosaurs on Earth, making it one of the most significant impacts w