London, UK (SPX) Dec 08, 2025
Lodestar Space has secured funding through the UK Space Agency's Space Ecosystem Commercialisation Programme, delivered by Space South Central, to accelerate work on its on-orbit sensing system Mithril. The SECP Sprint R and D grant of GBP 30,000 will pay for integration and testing of a new LiDAR sensor within Mithril's existing on-orbit sensing suite. Mithril is described as a fully auto

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 09, 2025
Researchers have characterized a bacterium from spacecraft assembly cleanrooms that can enter an extreme dormant state, allowing it to persist where contamination controls are designed to remove nearly all life. The study centers on Tersicoccus phoenicis, a microbe detected in high-grade cleanrooms used by NASA and the European Space Agency to prepare spacecraft hardware. The team found th

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Watch the replay of the media briefing held ahead of the 14th operational launch of the Galileo programme. The briefing covers the mission details for the launch of two Galileo satellites, which are set to lift off on 17 December aboard Ariane 6 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

Leading X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and XRISM have spotted an extraordinary blast from a supermassive black hole. In a matter of hours, the gravitational monster whipped up powerful winds, flinging material out into space at eye-watering speeds of 60 000 km per second.

Geneva, Switzerland (SPX) Dec 09, 2025
The RISTRETTO project at the University of Geneva has reached a key stage, with several core elements of its high-precision spectrograph now prototyped and tested for observations of the nearby exoplanet Proxima b. The instrument is designed to study the faint reflected light of this Earth-sized planet, which orbits Proxima Centauri at a temperature compatible with liquid water but remains outsh

Stanford CA (SPX) Dec 09, 2025
Imagine a robot about the size of a toaster floating through the tight corridors of the International Space Station, quietly moving supplies or checking for leaks - all without an astronaut at the controls. Such technology could free up valuable time for astronauts and open new opportunities for robotics-based exploration. That sci-fi vision is coming closer to reality now that Stanford research

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 09, 2025
For decades, nuclear physicists have known that so called islands of inversion mark regions of the nuclear chart where standard shell structure breaks down and magic numbers vanish in favor of strongly deformed shapes. In earlier work these islands were identified mainly in neutron rich isotopes such as beryllium 12 with N = 8, magnesium 32 with N = 20, and chromium 64 with N = 40, all distant f

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 09, 2025
An international group of astronomers led by Texas Tech University assistant professor Elias Aydi published a paper titled Multiple outflows and delayed ejections revealed by early imaging of novae in Nature Astronomy on Dec. 5. The team used interferometry with the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array in California, combining light from multiple telescopes to obtain the hi

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 09, 2025
Astronomers are testing a new way to measure how fast the universe is expanding by using time delays in gravitationally lensed images of distant quasars, in an effort to clarify the long-standing tension between different measurements of the Hubble constant. The expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble constant, describes how quickly galaxies recede as a function of distance, wi

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 09, 2025
Gamma ray bursts rank among the most energetic explosions known, usually flashing and fading within seconds or minutes, but on 2 July 2025 astronomers detected GRB 250702B, a source that produced repeated bursts for over seven hours and now stands as the longest gamma ray burst yet observed. Space based observatories, including NASAs Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope, first recorded the gamma rays