Paris, France (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
Planetek Italia has placed the AI eXpress 1 Plus (AIX-1+) satellite in orbit, completing the first generation of its AI eXpress constellation for in-orbit artificial intelligence processing of Earth observation data. AIX-1+ launched on November 28, 2025, at 10:44 a.m. PT (7:44 p.m. GMT+1) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission (Transporter 15) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg

Tucson AZ (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
Seventy light-years from Earth, astronomers studying the star Kappa Tucanae A have identified dust heated to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit orbiting very close to the star, where such material should either vaporize or be blown out of the system. The team has now detected a companion star moving through this same inner region, offering a new way to investigate how this hot exozodiacal dust f

Southampton, UK (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
A University of Southampton team has identified a distinct low frequency radio signature that appears when small-scale auroral structures known as auroral beads emerge, providing a new clue to how intense auroral substorms are triggered. Magnetospheric substorms are bursts of activity in Earth's aurora that can rapidly transform faint arcs into bright, dynamic displays stretching across th

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have produced the first detailed calculation of how fast time passes on Mars compared with Earth, providing a parameter that future human and robotic missions will need for navigation and communications. They determine that clocks on the Martian surface run on average 477 microseconds faster per Earth day than clocks on Earth, with

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has established the Nebular Origins of the Universe Research (NOUR) Laboratory to investigate how the chemistry of interstellar material leads to the formation of planetary systems. The lab, located within SwRI's Space Science Division and led by Senior Research Scientist Dr. Danna Qasim, is designed to connect pre-planetary chemical evolution with the later s

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
An international team including astronomers from the University of Geneva and the National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS has used the James Webb Space Telescope to study helium escaping from the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-107b. The analysis, published in Nature Astronomy, links this large-scale atmospheric escape to the evolution and present-day properties of the planet. A

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
Billions of years ago, rainfall on Mars fed rivers that cut valleys, overtopped crater rims and carved canyons, with some flows likely reaching a northern ocean basin on the planet. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have now organized these fluvial features into large drainage systems, producing the first global inventory of major Martian river basins and identifying 16 larg

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
NASA's Perseverance rover identified light-colored rocks in Jezero crater that consist of white, aluminum-rich kaolinite clay. These rocks formed after prolonged exposure to water leached other minerals from parent rocks and sediments. The process required millions of years of rainfall in a humid environment. Perseverance's SuperCam and Mastcam-Z instruments analyzed the kaolinite fragment

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 03, 2025
For the first time in the history of the International Space Station, all eight of its docking ports are occupied following the reinstallation of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft on the Earth-facing port of the Unity module. The visiting vehicles now attached are two SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, the Cygnus XL cargo ship, JAXA's HTV-X1 cargo vehicle, two Roscosmos Soyuz crew spacecraft,