Bethesda, MD (SPX) Apr 21, 2021
Many recent articles have expressed concern about the growing amount of junk floating around Earth in low orbits. Ultimately, the mass and distribution of junk and active satellites will exceed the capacity of space to safely contain the debris generated by the addition of more than an estimated 50,000 new satellites planned for deployment in the next few years. If and when this limit is reached

Beijing (Sputnik) Apr 21, 2021
China now has 400 satellites in orbit, second only in number to the United States and it is projected to have at least one thousand of them deployed by the end of this decade, Space Command chief Army General James Dickinson said in congressional testimony on Tuesday. "Back in 2010 they had 70 satellites in orbit: Today they have 400," Dickinson told the US Senate Armed Services Committee.

Toulouse, France (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
Airbus has passed an important milestone for the OneSat flexible satellite product line, with the Final Design Review successfully achieved with customers and space agencies. The fully reconfigurable OneSat product line features major innovations and disruptive technologies including the latest digital processing and active antennas enabling several thousand beams. In addition, to meet the

Perth, Australia (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
Astronomers have discovered a pulsar - a dense and rapidly spinning neutron star sending radio waves into the cosmos - using a low-frequency radio telescope in outback Australia. The pulsar was detected with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, in Western Australia's remote Mid West region. It's the first time scientists have discovered a pulsar with the MWA but they believ

Washington DC (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
A team of astronomers including Carnegie's Alycia Weinberger and former-Carnegie postdoc Meredith MacGregor, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun's nearest neighbor - the star Proxima Centauri. Their work, which could help guide the search for life beyond our Solar System, is published in The Astrophysical Jou

Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 22, 2021
Astronomers using data from NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) telescopes have released a new all-sky map of the outermost region of our galaxy. Known as the galactic halo, this area lies outside the swirling spiral arms that form the Milky Way's recognizable central disk and is sparsely populated with stars. Though the halo may appear mostly empty, it is also predicted to contain a massive re

Baltimore MD (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
Before planets around other stars were first discovered in the 1990s, these far-flung exotic worlds lived only in the imagination of science fiction writers. But even their creative minds could not have conceived of the variety of worlds astronomers have uncovered. Many of these worlds, called exoplanets, are vastly different from our solar system's family of planets. They range from star-

Kyoto, Japan (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
Water is abundant in our solar system. Even outside of our own planet, scientists have detected ice on the moon, in Saturn's rings and in comets, liquid water on Mars and under the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus, and traces of water vapor in the scorching atmosphere of Venus. Studies have shown that water played an important role in the early evolution and formation of the solar system

Paris (ESA) Apr 22, 2021
On 23 April 2001, ESA astronaut Umberto Guidoni first set foot, or hand, on the International Space Station, making him the first European to visit and work the orbiting outpost. Since then, the Space Station has grown immensely, as have the number of Europeans to have worked in it, together with the science experiments performed in orbit. When Umberto arrived, he flew on the Space Shuttle

Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 22, 2021
The growing list of "firsts" for Perseverance, NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian