Rome NY (SPX) Mar 30, 2023
The Department of the Air Force, or DAF, in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, or AFRL, and Space Systems Command, opened registration Feb. 22, 2023, for the qualification round of the fourth annual "Hack-A-Sat" competition, the world's first satellite hacking contest hosted for an on-orbit satellite. Hack-A-Sat is an opportunity for hackers, researchers and everyday ent

San Jose CA (SPX) Apr 03, 2023
Momentus Inc. (NASDAQ: MNTS) has successfully completed the initial test sequence on-orbit of its pioneering Microwave Electrothermal Thruster (MET) that relies on solar power and uses distilled water as a propellant. The MET is the Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle's (OSV) primary propulsion method that produces thrust by expelling extremely hot gases through a rocket nozzle. Unlike a conv

Houston (AFP) April 3, 2023
NASA is to reveal the names on Monday of the astronauts - three Americans and a Canadian - who will fly around the Moon next year, a prelude to returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time in a half century. The mission, Artemis II, is scheduled to take place in November 2024 with the four-person crew circling the Moon but not landing on it. As part of the Artemis program,

Washington DC (UPI) Apr 2, 2023
SpaceX launched 10 Space Development Agency satellites into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Sunday in the Tranche 0 mission. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on a cloudy day at about 10:29 p.m. EST, marking the 22nd launch by SpaceX this year and 221st all time. A previous launch attempt was scrubbed on Thursday after one of the booster's nine engines automatically tr

Rome (AFP) March 31, 2023
Italy's privacy watchdog said Friday it had blocked the controversial robot ChatGPT, saying the artificial intelligence app did not respect user data and could not verify users' age. The decision "with immediate effect" will result in "the temporary limitation of the processing of Italian user data vis-a-vis OpenAI", the Italian Data Protection Authority said. The agency has launched an

Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 02, 2023
NASA's Perseverance rover is now exploring the upper surface of the Western Fan in Jezero crater, having completed a very successful one Mars year Prime Mission. It has sealed 22 of the 43 sample tubes it brought to Mars and created the Three Forks Sample Depot where it deposited 10 of these samples. The Mars Sample Return mission aims to bring some of the samples that Perseverance collect

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Mar 31, 2023
Like a tornado siren for life-threatening storms in America's heartland, a new computer model that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and NASA satellite data could sound the alarm for dangerous space weather. The model uses AI to analyze spacecraft measurements of the solar wind (an unrelenting stream of material from the Sun) and predict where an impending solar storm will strike, anywhere o

Sheffield UK (SPX) Mar 31, 2023
An explosion the size of our solar system has baffled scientists, as part of its shape - similar to that of an extremely flat disc - challenges everything we know about explosions in space. The explosion observed was a bright Fast Blue Optical Transient (FBOT) - an extremely rare class of explosion which is much less common than other explosions, such as supernovas. The first bright FBOT w

Evanston IL (SPX) Mar 31, 2023
The cosmos would look a lot better if Earth's atmosphere wasn't photo bombing it all the time. Even images obtained by the world's best ground-based telescopes are blurry due to the atmosphere's shifting pockets of air. While seemingly harmless, this blur obscures the shapes of objects in astronomical images, sometimes leading to error-filled physical measurements that are essential for understa

Taiyuan, China (XNA) Mar 31, 2023
China launched four Earth-observation satellites from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanxi province on Thursday afternoon. The group consists of one 320-kilogram pivot satellite and three 270-kg assistant satellites, and are the first space-based assets in the Hongtu 1 network. The satellites were sent into space by a Long March 2D carrier rocket that blasted off at 6:50 pm.