At the European Space Agency’s technical heart in the Netherlands, engineers have spent the last five months unboxing and testing elements of Europe’s next space science mission. With the two main parts now joined together, Smile is well on its way to being ready to launch by the end of 2025.

To kick off this year’s ESA Academy Experiments programme, five university student teams from across Europe were invited to visit the experimental test facilities at ESTEC – ESA’s technical centre in the Netherlands – and Novespace, France.

Washington (AFP) Mar 6, 2025
Elon Musk's SpaceX is now aiming for Thursday to conduct the next test flight of its massive Starship rocket, following a last-minute cancellation on Monday. The world's biggest and most powerful launch vehicle is set to lift off from SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas, during a launch window that opens at 5:30 pm local time (2330 GMT). An earlier attempt set for Wednesday was postponed a day without explanation.

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 06, 2025
NASA has implemented energy-saving measures to keep the Voyager spacecraft operational for as long as possible, despite their decreasing power supply. On February 25, mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California powered down the cosmic ray subsystem aboard Voyager 1, and on March 24, they will deactivate Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrume

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 06, 2025
Channels carved by rivers, lava, and ice all exhibit winding, sinuous patterns, yet a new study from The University of Texas at Austin has identified a fundamental difference in the way rivers bend compared to volcanic and ice-carved channels. This discovery may provide a new method for determining the origins of planetary channels where direct observation is not possible. While the specif

Washington (AFP) Mar 6, 2025
A drill to search for ice. A 4G network test. Three rovers and a first-of-its-kind hopping drone. After becoming the first private firm to land on the Moon last year, Intuitive Machines is aiming for its second lunar touchdown on Thursday, carrying cutting-edge payloads to support future human missions. The Houston-based company is targeting no earlier than 12:32 pm ET (1732 GMT) at Mons

Boston MA (SPX) Mar 05, 2025
When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop - "zookeeper" featured prominently for a while - but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist. When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents' Chicago home recently, it fel

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Mar 04, 2025
The Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC) experiment has successfully arrived on the lunar surface, where it will operate for one full lunar day-equivalent to 14 Earth days-conducting research on how lunar dust adheres to various materials under the Moon's harsh environmental conditions. "Sunday morning marked a defining moment in both our company's journey and the future of commercial

It's a long way to Mars, and explorers headed there will either have to take enough food and supplies to last the whole trip or use in-situ resources to make what they need. A recent ESA Discovery project led by the Universitat de València explored whether microalgae extracted from lichen could survive on Mars and be used to produce oxygen, food and other useful substances.

With a new Memorandum of Intent (MoI) signed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Mobile Satellite Services Association (MSSA), seamless mobile connectivity that extends everywhere from rural areas to bustling cities has just become closer to reality. The collaboration aims to overcome current coverage limitations by seamlessly combining space and terrestrial systems, helping to close the digital divide across Europe.