Image: Ariane 6 main stage final test firing

Last week, members of ESA’s astronaut class of 2022 embarked on their first overseas field trip. They visited NASA’s facilities at the Johnson Space Centre (JSC) in Houston, Texas, USA, to get familiar with the environment where they will spend a significant part of their training once assigned to a mission. 

Pasadena CA (SPX) Dec 21, 2023
At nearly 14,000 feet, Maunakea is the tallest mountain in Hawai'i, and the second tallest on any island on Earth. Clouds often settle below the mountain's barren, dark-brown summit, making the site one of the best for astronomy in the world. At the summit, one can find several of the world's finest telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory, a partnership between Caltech and the Uni

Sydney, Australia (SPX) Dec 21, 2023
Helicity Space, a name that's beginning to resonate in the commercial space industry, recently heralded a significant advance in its quest to redefine space propulsion. The company has successfully secured a $5 million seed funding round, a move that not only underscores the industry's confidence in fusion technology but also marks a pivotal moment in space travel innovation. This round of

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Dec 21, 2023
The cosmos comes alive in an all-sky time-lapse movie made from 14 years of data acquired by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Our Sun, occasionally flaring into prominence, serenely traces a path through the sky against the backdrop of high-energy sources within our galaxy and beyond. "The bright, steady gamma-ray glow of the Milky Way is punctuated by intense, days-long flares of n

Paris (ESA) Dec 21, 2023
Despite our many years spent observing the cosmos with ever-more powerful telescopes, there remains much to learn about the Milky Way. We cannot leave our galaxy to get a full outside view of its shape and properties, as we do when we study other galaxies. We are embedded within it, and so are limited to mapping the Milky Way from the inside out - and from a single vantage point. At the st

Austin TX (SPX) Dec 21, 2023
Like a celestial beacon, distant quasars make the brightest light in the universe. They emit more light than our entire Milky Way galaxy. The light comes from matter ripped apart as it is swallowed by a supermassive black hole. Cosmological parameters are important numerical constraints astronomers use to trace the evolution of the entire universe billions of years after the Big Bang. Quas

Notre Dame IN (SPX) Dec 21, 2023
A team of astrophysicists led by Lauren Weiss, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Notre Dame, created the first-ever catalog of small, Earth-like planets with Jupiter-like siblings (planets that share the same star) - a critical component in the search for life elsewhere in our universe. Forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal, the Kepler G

Boulder CO (SPX) Dec 21, 2023
New Horizons is healthy and speeding across the Kuiper Belt at a distance of over 5.5 billion miles from Earth! The spacecraft is collecting round-the-clock data on our Sun's cocoon in the galaxy called the heliosphere, and transmitting that data as well as the final datasets from our flyby of Kuiper Belt object (KBO) Arrokoth, back to Earth. The big news for New Horizons since I wro

Washington DC (UPI) Dec 20, 2023
The White House said Wednesday that the United States plans to land an international astronaut on the surface of the moon by 2030. Vice President Kamala Harris will announce the mission at Wednesday's Space Council meeting. "The meeting will highlight the United States' extraordinary progress in broadening and deepening international space partnerships across a range of areas, including