A telecommunications satellite that can be reprogrammed in-orbit, offering unprecedented mission reconfiguration capacity, has successfully passed its in-orbit acceptance review.

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
The U.S. Fusion Outreach Team, a grassroots organization in the fusion community focused on reducing barriers to outreach efforts, has launched a new centralized website to engage an expanding workforce, media, educators, and the public in the journey toward a world powered by fusion energy. The U.S. fusion community has just completed a two year strategic planning process to focus on a bo

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
Future fusion reactors have a conundrum: maintain a plasma core that is hotter than the surface of the sun without melting the walls that contain the plasma. Fusion scientists refer to this challenge as "core-edge integration." Researchers working at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics have recently tackled this problem in two ways: the first aims to make the fusion core

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) from fusion reactions was achieved in the laboratory for the first time during an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) on Aug. 8, 2021. These results mark an 8-fold improvement over experiments conducted in spring 2021 and a 25-fold incr

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
The march towards fusion energy gain, required for commercial fusion energy, is not always visible. Progress occurs in fits and starts through experiments in national laboratories, universities, and more recently at private companies. Sam Wurzel, a Technology-to-Market Advisor at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), details and highlights this progress over the last 60 ye

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) Nov 11, 2021
Today, the next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-T successfully arrived at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to begin launch preparations. It is the third of four satellites in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s GOES-R weather satellite series built by Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] in Littleton, Colorado. GOES-T will help NOAA provide

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
Spacecraft have long used heat shields for protection during entry into planetary atmospheres. Future missions to the outer solar system will need more sophisticated materials than currently exist. The extreme heating conditions needed to study new shield materials are, however, very difficult to achieve experimentally on Earth. Scientists working at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at

Moscow (Sputnik) Nov 15, 2021
The station was hit by space debris earlier this year. A piece of space junk struck the Canadian remote robotic system, but the incident did not affect the operation of the device or the ISS in general. The International Space Station had to perform a manoeuvre in order to avoid a collision with space junk, left by the Chinese Fengyun-1C satellite, the Russian State Space Corporation Rosco

Paris, France (SPX) Nov 12, 2021
At the fourth Paris Peace Forum, Arianespace became one of the first companies to sign the Net Zero Space charter, designed to reduce space debris by 2030 and foster more sustainable use of space for humanity. This agreement is the result of an international effort by many players in the space sector, including Eutelsat Planet, Astroscale and the French space agency, CNES. The aim of

Newcastle upon Tyne UK (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
The UK Space Agency has awarded almost Pounds 650,000 to Northumbria University to continue world-leading work to develop the first commercially available laser-based inter-satellite communications system. Currently satellites use radio frequency to transmit data, but this is limited in terms of speed, capacity and data security. However, researchers at Northumbria University are working