Image: Atom-scale scan of space materials

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of rapid changes to the asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 545-kilogram spacecraft on 26 September 2022. The primary objective of the NASA mission, called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to test our ability to alter the asteroid’s trajectory as it orbits its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. Though Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, data from the mission could help inform researchers how to potentially change an asteroid’s path away from Earth, if ever necessary.

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Carole Mundell is the new Director of Science, succeeding the current director Günther Hasinger.

Professor Mundell is an internationally renowned scientist with extensive experience in inclusive leadership, operational management, strategy and international science policy development.

She joined ESA from the University of Bath where she held the Hiroko Sherwin Chair in Extragalactic Astronomy, was founding Head of Astrophysics, and served as Head of the Department of Physics until becoming the first woman Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2018 and first Chief International Science Envoy in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office until 2021.

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 28, 2023
Cities are complicated places to fly. Tall buildings, local microclimates, high winds, and other factors present challenges - both known and unpredictable - for current and future air vehicles. But creating new air mobility solutions to move people and cargo will require addressing those challenges. And that's where NASA's Data and Reasoning Fabric (DRF) project can help. DRF designs techn

Tucson AZ (SPX) Feb 28, 2023
World View, a global leader in stratospheric exploration and flight, has appointmented Ian Thomas as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Thomas brings more than 30 years of experience scaling global businesses, including 15 years with The Boeing Company, where he served in a variety of senior leadership roles in the United States (U.S.) and Europe, and then led the company's operations, successively, i

Chippenham UK (SPX) Mar 01, 2023
ReliaSat Limited, a UK-based employee-owned enterprise, has acquired Arralis Technologies, a leading manufacturer of millimetre wave communications technology. The acquisition includes all of Arralis Technologies' European intellectual property and manufacturing facilities, which will be rebranded under the ReliaSat name. ReliaSat was founded by former Arralis Technologies CEO Mike Gleaves

Cologne, Germany (SPX) Mar 01, 2023
An - international team of researchers under the leadership of Dr Florian Peissker at the University of Cologne's Institute of Astrophysics has discovered a very young star in its formation phase near the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the centre of our Milky Way. The star is only several tens of thousands of years old, making it younger than humanity. The special thing

Washington DC (SPX) Mar 01, 2023
An international team of scientists has uncovered new information about the remains of a star whose explosion was discovered 450 years ago. The results provided new clues about how the conditions in the shock waves created by titanic stellar explosions, called supernovae, accelerate particles to near the speed of light. The supernova remnant is called Tycho, named for Danish astronomer Tyc

Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 01, 2023
A specialized laboratory setup at JPL removes the chemical influence of modern organisms so scientists can study the chemistry that may have led to life's emergence. In the Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you can find a world in a test tube - specifically, a simplified simulation of early Earth. By re-creating the conditions that would have been found on o

Potsdam, Germany (SPX) Mar 01, 2023
Astronomers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the Vatican Observatory (VO) teamed up to spectroscopically survey more than 1000 bright stars that potentially host exoplanets. The team presents precise values of 54 spectroscopic parameters per star in the first of a series of papers in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics and releases all its data to the scientific c