Beijing (XNA) Feb 18, 2021
Chinese astronauts have started receiving intensive training for spaceflights tasked with building the nation's space station, the China Manned Space Agency said on Tuesday. Several astronauts have spent the past year in hard training and are now in the prelaunch training phase, focusing on extravehicular activities and some other operations, it said in a news release. The agency sai

KSC FL (SPX) Feb 18, 2021
On Saturday, February 20, no earlier than 12:36 p.m. EST, Northrop Grumman is scheduled to launch its Cygnus spacecraft on an Antares rocket to the International Space Station (ISS), marking its 15th mission under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program. The launch, which will take place from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, will deliver thousands of pounds of critical

Toledo OH (SPX) Feb 17, 2021
The military is adding fuel to the momentum of physicists at The University of Toledo who are advancing new frontiers in thin-film, highly efficient, low-cost photovoltaic technology to ensure a clean energy future. The U.S. Air Force awarded UToledo $12.5 million to develop photovoltaic energy sheets that would live in space and harvest solar energy to transmit power wirelessly to Earth-b

Saint-Senier-De-Beuvron, France (AFP) Feb 19, 2021
To realise his dream of satellite-powered internet, tech billionaire Elon Musk needs to install antennas around the world. In northern France, a village hopes he'll decide to keep those antennas far away. Saint-Senier-de-Beuvron, population 350, is none too thrilled to have been picked as a ground station for Musk's Starlink project for broadband from space. "This project is totally new.

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Lusaka – the capital and largest city of Zambia.

Washington DC (UPI) Feb 18, 2021
Using neutron diffraction, scientists have characterized the crystalline structure of a newly named ice form, ice XIX. Researchers described the exotic ice form in a new paper, published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications. Almost all naturally occurring frozen water on planet Earth, whether ice or snow, exists in the hexagonal crystal form called ordinary ice - or ice

Beijing, China (SPX) Feb 19, 2021
Cygnus X-1, a binary star system first discovered in 1964, comprises one of the closest black holes to Earth. New observations of this black hole, the first ever detected, have led astronomers to question what they know about the Universe's most mysterious objects. An international team, including researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (

Berlin, Germany (DLR) Feb 18, 2021
Today, on the evening of 18 February 2021, NASA's Mars 2020 mission has safely landed the rover 'Perseverance' in Jezero Crater at 21:55 (CET). With these image products, the landing site of the most powerful of all Mars rovers to date can be explored on screen. The interactive map of Jezero Crater was created by researchers at Freie Universitat Berlin (FUB) using pre-processed data acquired by

Washington DC (UPI) Feb 18, 2021
NASA's planned landing of the Mars rover Perseverance at 3:55 p.m. EST Thursday will begin a process to advance exploration and understanding of the Red Planet by leaps and bounds - if all goes well. New landing technology being employed is vital to future missions, especially if humans are ever to set foot on Mars, Steve Jurczyk, NASA's acting administrator, said in an interview Wedne

Washington (AFP) Feb 18, 2021
After seven months in space, NASA's Perseverance rover survived a nail-biting landing phase to touch down gently on the surface of Mars on Thursday, ready to embark on its mission to search for the signs of ancient microbial life. "Touchdown confirmed," said operations lead Swati Mohan at around 3:55 pm Eastern Time (2055 GMT), as mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasade