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Last night at 23:14 UTC, NASA's DART spacecraft successfully struck asteroid Dimorphos, the 160-metre moonlet orbiting around the larger Didymos asteroid. About 38 seconds later, the time it took for the light to arrive at Earth, people all over the world saw the abrupt end of the live stream from the spacecraft, signalling that the impact had happened successfully – DART was no more. 

Astronomers on a small slice of our planet’s surface, extending from southern and eastern Africa to the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula, could actually watch it live with their telescopes. Among those

Brussels, Belgium (SPX) Sep 22, 2022
Animations of the relative heights of the cloud tops of Jupiter reveal delicately textured swirls and peaks that resemble the frosting on top of a cupcake. The results have been presented by citizen scientist and professional mathematician and software developer, Gerald Eichstadt, at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 in Granada. The animation uses data from JunoCam, the visible-l

Pasadena CA (JPL) Sep 21, 2022
NASA's InSight lander has detected seismic waves from four space rocks that crashed on Mars in 2020 and 2021. Not only do these represent the first impacts detected by the spacecraft's seismometer since InSight touched down on the Red Planet in 2018, it also marks the first time seismic and acoustic waves from an impact have been detected on Mars. A new paper published Monday in Nature Geo

Washington DC (SPX) Sep 22, 2022
NASA released a revised version of its Moon to Mars objectives Tuesday, forming a blueprint for shaping exploration throughout the solar system. These guideposts in the agency's Moon to Mars exploration approach will help shape NASA's investments, as well as those of the agency's industry and international partners, toward the Moon and beyond. Starting with 50 draft objectives developed by

Brussels, Belgium (SPX) Sep 22, 2022
Prospective Mars explorers can now take a hike around the landing site of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover with an interactive map (https://maps.planet.fu-berlin.de/jezero/) loaded with orbital imagery, terrain data as well as synthetic and real 3D panoramic views of Jezero crater and its surrounding area. The map, which can be accessed through a normal web browser, has been presented at the

Vandenberg SFB CA (SPX) Sep 24, 2022
Team Vandenberg launched a National Reconnaissance Office mission (NROL-91) aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket from Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex-6 Saturday, Sept. 24, at 3:25 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Col. Bryan Titus, Space Launch Delta 30 vice commander, was the launch decision authority. "Today the Western Range closed a chapter in history that began with

Paris, France (SPX) Sep 25, 2022
During a technical session at IAC, Michael Vergalla, CTO of Outpost, presented a paper on the findings of Outpost's two successful flight tests on a breakthrough technology of an autonomous paraglider re-entry system to enable industry-leading payload Earth return capabilities from orbit. The tests, conducted in April 2022, are a huge milestone for Outpost in creating a technology that wil

Luxembourg (SPX) Sep 25, 2022
An SES-led consortium of 20 European companies, with the European Space Agency (ESA) and European Commission support, will design, develop, launch and operate the EAGLE-1 satellite-based end-to-end system for secure Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), enabling in-orbit validation and demonstration of next-generation cyber-security across Europe. The groundbreaking partnership between ESA and a

Manoa HI (SPX) Sep 27, 2022
How old is our universe, and what is its size? A team of researchers led by University of Hawai?i at Manoa astronomers Brent Tully and Ehsan Kourkchi from the Institute for Astronomy have assembled the largest-ever compilation of high-precision galaxy distances, called Cosmicflows-4. Using eight different methods, they measured the distances to a whopping 56,000 galaxies. The study has been publ