Copernical Team
Russia's Luna-25 probe enters Moon orbit
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Moscow's Luna-25 lander is due to reach the moon's orbit Wednesday, in the first such Russian mission in almost 50 years, according to the schedule of space agency Roscosmos.
With the lunar launch, Moscow's first since 1976, Russia is seeking to restart and rebuild on the Soviet Union's pioneering space program.
The lander is set to revolve 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the moon's surface, before a planned landing Monday north of the Boguslawsky crater on the lunar south pole.
Cameras installed on the lander have already taken distant shots of the Earth and moon from space, Roscosmos said.
The lander, weighing around 800 kilograms (1,764 pounds), was carried into space by a Soyuz rocket launched Friday from the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia's Far East.
It is due to stay on the moon for a year, where it is tasked with collecting samples and analyzing soil.
The mission comes as the future of Russia's long-running cooperation with the West in space looks in doubt, as Moscow presses ahead with its offensive in Ukraine.
Russia said it would go ahead with its own lunar plans, despite the European Space Agency (ESA) announcing it would not cooperate with Moscow on future missions over its actions in Ukraine.
New data reveal US space economy's output is shrinking—an economist explains in 3 charts
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The space industry has changed dramatically since the Apollo program put men on the moon in the late 1960s.
Today, over 50 years later, private companies are sending tourists to the edge of space and building lunar landers. NASA is bringing together 27 countries to peacefully explore the moon and beyond, and it is using the James Webb Space Telescope to peer back in time. Private companies are playing a much larger role in space than they ever have before, though NASA and other government interests continue to drive scientific advances.
I'm a macroeconomistwho's interested in understanding how these space-related innovations and the growing role of private industry have affected the economy.
XRISM spacecraft will open new window on the X-ray cosmos
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The upcoming XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, pronounced "crism") spacecraft will study the universe's hottest regions, largest structures, and objects with the strongest gravity.
Led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), XRISM will peer into these cosmic extremes using spectroscopy, the study of how light and matter interact. In this explainer, video producer Sophia Roberts from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center walks us through how understanding spectroscopy deepens our knowledge of the universe.
"I think we all get excited for the beautiful images we get from missions like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope," Roberts said. "But after taking a deep dive into spectroscopy, I really appreciate the critical context it gives scientists about the story behind those pictures.
Talking with Webb using the Deep Space Network
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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is nearly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometer) away from Earth, orbiting around the sun-Earth Lagrange point 2. How do we send commands and receive telemetry—the science and engineering data from the observatory—from that far away? We use the DSN (Deep Space Network) to communicate with the observatory. We receive data when we have a contact with Webb using a DSN antenna
Sandy Kwan, the mission interface manager for Webb within the DSN, notes that "each mesmerizing Webb image that has graced our screens would not have been possible without the support of the DSN antennas and personnel, the backbone of interplanetary communication."
The DSN has three sites around the world, each positioned 120 degrees apart. There are antennas in Goldstone, California; Canberra, Australia; and Madrid, Spain. This allows us to communicate with Webb at any time of day, as the Earth rotates. The DSN is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
RTX to develop platform agnostic, beyond-line-of-sight, satcoms
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Collins Aerospace, an RTX (NYSE: RTX) business, has been awarded a $36 million contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop and demonstrate a platform-agnostic, Beyond-Line-Of-Sight, satellite communications pod.
The communications pod will provide warfighters resilient, high bandwidth, low latency communications and data directly to the cockpit. The pod brings together After capturing image of black hole, what's next?
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Agroup of international researchers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) achieved the once-unimaginable four years ago: using a groundbreaking telescope to capture an image of a black hole.
Last month some of those researchers, engineers, and physicists convened at Harvard to consider and begin drawing up plans for the next step: a closer study of the photon r Hundred-year storms? That's how long they last on Saturn.
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The largest storm in the solar system, a 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone called the Great Red Spot, has decorated Jupiter's surface for hundreds of years.
A new study now shows that Saturn - though much blander and less colorful than Jupiter - also has long-lasting megastorms with impacts deep in the atmosphere that persist for centuries.
The study was conducted by astronomers from the All Eyes on the Ice Giants
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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft plans to observe Uranus and Neptune from its location far out in the outer solar system this fall, and the mission team is inviting the global amateur astronomy community to come along for the ride - and make a real contribution to space science - by observing both ice giants at the same time.
In September - in tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope - New Hor China's Kuaizhou-1A rocket launches five new satellites
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China launched a Kuaizhou 1A carrier rocket on Monday afternoon at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province, placing five communication satellites in space, according to the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp.
The State-owned space contractor said in a news release that the solid-propellant rocket blasted off at 1:32 pm from its launch vehicle and soon deployed the He KBR JV awarded $719M contract to aid NASA's development of space orbital systems
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KBR (NYSE: KBR) is pleased to announce NASA's award to the Space and Technology Solutions team, a KBR joint venture with Intuitive Machines (Nasdaq: LUNR, LUNRW), to provide multidisciplinary engineering for some of NASA's most critical space orbital systems in its Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland. The Government Accountability Offi 
