Forres UK (SPX) May 05, 2023
Orbex has announced that construction has begun at Sutherland Spaceport (formerly known as Space Hub Sutherland) in Scotland, making this the first vertical launch spaceport to be built on the UK mainland. Located on the North coast of Scotland, the spaceport will be the 'home' spaceport of Forres-based rocket and launch services company, Orbex, which will use the site to launch up to 12 orbital

Leiden, Netherlands (SPX) May 05, 2023
Searching for life's building blocks lightyears away is an important task of the James Webb Space Telescope. But how does it know what to look for? PhD student Marina Gomes Rachid is offering a helping hand by mapping out molecules that could exist in deep space. Imagine the headlights of a car on a misty day. A beam of light becomes visible in the fog, revealing particles of moisture floa

Baltimore MD (SPX) May 05, 2023
Our universe is so capricious it sometimes likes to play a game of hide and seek. In 2017, astronomers were surprised to see a huge shadow sweeping across a disk of dust and gas encircling the nearby young star TW Hydrae. The shadow is cast by an inner disk of dust and gas that is slightly tilted to the plane of the outer disk. The shadow can only be clearly seen because the system is tilted fac

Ithica CA (SPX) May 05, 2023
A "beautiful effect" predicted by quantum electrodynamics (QED) can explain the puzzling first observations of polarized X-rays emitted by a magnetar - a neutron star featuring a powerful magnetic field, according to a Cornell astrophysicist. The extremely dense and hot remnant of a massive star, boasting a magnetic field 100 trillion times stronger than Earth's, was expected to generate h

Washington DC (UPI) May 4, 2023
Russian Roscosmos cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin completed a spacewalk Wednesday to transfer an equipment airlock from one module of the International Space Station to another. While Prokopyev and Petelin were outside assisting, a third cosmonaut, Andrey Fedyaev, stayed inside the station to operate the European Robotic Arm to move the airlock from the station's Rassvet

Washington DC (UPI) May 4, 2023
SpaceX carried another 56 Starlink Internet satellites into space from the Cape Canaveral Space Station on Thursday morning, its 27th orbital mission on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket this year. The satellites released into lower Earth orbit on Thursday will enable Internet users around the world to connect online to remote and far-flung regions of Earth. For SpaceX, the successful launc

Pasadena CA (SPX) May 05, 2023
In August 1865, a 10-pound rock fell from space to Earth, landing with a bang in the remote village of Sherghati, India. After being recovered by witnesses to the event, the stone passed into the possession of a local British magistrate who endeavored to identify the source of the strange object. After more than a century of studying the meteorite fragments-so-called shergottites-researchers in

Paris, France (SPX) May 05, 2023
Half a century after Apollo 11 initiated the first lunar surveys, a collaborative team of scientists from CNRS, University of the Cote d'Azur, Cote d'Azur Observatory, Sorbonne University, and Paris Observatory-PSL has unveiled a previously unknown aspect of the Moon's internal structure: a solid core akin to Earth's. Alongside this groundbreaking discovery, the researchers also provide evidence

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over El Oued, in northeast Algeria, about 80 km west of the border with Tunisia.