Copernical Team
Researchers discover solar wind-derived water in lunar soils
Due to its crucial importance in future space exploration, the abundance, distribution and origin of lunar surface water have received a lot of attention recently.
A joint research team from the National Space Science Center (NSSC) and the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG), both affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), have discovered that the Chang'e-5 lunar soil gra Falcon 9 rocket launches 54 Starlink satellites
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 54 Starlink Internet satellites launched from Florida on Wednesday as part of a mission to begin populating a new orbital shell authorized by federal regulators.
The rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 4:34 a.m. The mission was SpaceX's 60th of the year, nearly double the total from last year. One more launch is scheduled for the end of NASA, SpaceX to Study Hubble Telescope Reboost Possibility
he non-exclusive SpaceX study regarding the possibilities of reboosting the Hubble Space Telescope is ongoing. On Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022, NASA issued a Request for Information to seek additional information about commercial capabilities available to reboost a satellite in orbit, using Hubble as a demonstration, at no cost to the government.
There are no plans at this time for NASA to cond The world's largest turbulence simulation unmasks the flow of energy in astrophysical plasmas
Researchers have uncovered a previously hidden heating process that helps explain how the atmosphere that surrounds the Sun called the "solar corona" can be vastly hotter than the solar surface that emits it.
The discovery at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) could improve tackling a range of astrophysical puzzles such as star formation, the o NASA, Alaska researchers to scan asteroid with radio waves
Researchers are preparing for a potentially "catastrophic" close encounter with an asteroid in 2029 by scanning an asteroid with radio waves on Tuesday.
NASA is teaming with scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute to send about 9.6 million radio waves to 2010 XC15, an asteroid that will pass by about twice the distance from Earth to the Moon.
The NASA, Russian space agency evaluate need for space station rescue mission
NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos are evaluating if they will need to mount a rescue mission to the International Space Station after discovering a coolant leak from the Russian Soyuz spacecraft currently docked at the station.
The leaking spacecraft, designated Soyuz MS-22, carried U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio, along with cosmonauts Dmitri Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev to the In Musk says nearly 100 Starlinks 'active' in Iran
Nearly 100 Starlink internet terminals are currently operating in Iran, SpaceX chief Elon Musk said Monday.
The tycoon had promised to bring the satellite internet network to the country in September as Iranian authorities imposed increasingly severe access restrictions, in a move activists called a campaign to limit information about protests that had broken out nationwide.
"Approachi Space junk bill passes Senate unanimously
U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper applauded Senate passage of his Orbital Sustainability (ORBITS) Act, a bipartisan bill to establish a first-of-its-kind demonstration program to reduce the amount of space junk in orbit. The bill passed the Senate unanimously.
"From satellite communications to rockets carrying humans into deep space, space debris is a massive threat to space operations," said Is mining in space socially acceptable?
Traditional mining has been subject to a negative stigma for some time. People, especially in developed countries, have a relatively negative view of this necessary economic activity. Primarily that is due to its environmental impacts—greenhouse gas emissions and habitat destruction are some of the effects that give the industry its negative image.
Mining in space is an entirely different proposition—any greenhouse gases emitted on the moon or asteroids are inconsequential, and there is no habitat to speak of on these barren rocks. So what is the general public's opinion on mining in space? A paper published in Sustainability by a group of researchers in Australia, one of the countries most impacted by the effects of terrestrial mining, now gives us an answer.
Strangely, as the paper points out, no one had previously studied this particular aspect of space resources. Despite the general media interest in ventures such as Planetary Resources and the success of missions such as Hayabusa-2, no one had attempted to understand how the general public felt about space mining.
NASA makes asteroid defense a priority, moving its NEO surveyor mission into the development phase
There's an old adage in the engineering field—what gets funded gets built. So it's sure to be a happy time over at the Planetary Society, as NEO Surveyor, the project the organization has primarily supported over the past few years, has made it through NASA's grueling budgetary process to reach the "development" stage, with an eye for a launch of the system in 2028.
NEO Surveyor is, as the name implies, a satellite specifically designed to survey for objects near the Earth (NEO). One of its primary contributions will be to look for asteroids and other small bodies that are potentially on an eventual collision course with Earth but are invisible to typical NEO survey missions because of their location in the solar system.
Typically, their signals are just background noise against the overwhelming signal from the sun. But NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures, allowing it to isolate potentially dangerous asteroids using this novel technique.
