Space Norway said Jan. 13 it expects to start repairing next month one of two undersea fiber-optic cables it operates between its Svalbard satellite station and mainland Norway, after a failure left the Arctic region without a backup connection.

John Plumb, president Biden's nominee to be assistant secretary of defense for space policy, told lawmakers that the United States has to prepare for the possibility of “conflict extending to, or originating in space.

Image: Solar power, going down

NASA officials are holding out hope that the first Space Launch System launch can still take place as soon as March despite a delay in the rollout of the vehicle for a key test until mid-February.

Birmingham UK (SPX) Jan 13, 2022
The results of a comprehensive search for a background of ultra-low frequency gravitational waves has been announced by an international team of astronomers including scientists from the Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Birmingham. These light-year-scale ripples, a consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity, permeate all of spacetime and could ori

Cape Town, South Africa (SPX) Jan 13, 2022
On Thursday 13 January the Cape Peninsula University of Technology is set to launch its third satellite mission into space from the Cape Canaveral launch site in the USA. The MDASat (Marine Domain Awareness) constellation has two main priorities namely ocean economy and healthcare and has been mandated by the Department of Science and Innovation to enhance South Africa's ocean's sovereignt

Tucson AZ (SPX) Jan 13, 2022
Megaripples, intermediate-scale bedforms caused by the action of the wind, have been studied extensively and thought to be largely inactive relics of past climates, save for a few exceptions. A new paper by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Matthew Chojnacki shows that abundant megaripple populations were identified across the north polar region of Mars and were found to be migratin

Pasadena CA (JPL) Jan 13, 2022
Today Curiosity is doing a little bit of everything: some contact science, some targeted science, and a little driving. When we started planning this morning, we had a beautiful view of the small ledge in front of us, named "The Prow," which shows some amazing layering. We also can see some disturbances in the sand that may be sliding caused by our approach. We, the rover planners, were bu

London, UK (SPX) Jan 13, 2022
An international team of researchers, led by postgraduate student Alexis Andres, has found that the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, not only flares irregularly from day to day but also in the long term. The team analysed 15 years' worth of data to come to this conclusion. The research was initiated by Andres in 2019 when he was a summer student at the University of Amster

Montreal, Canada (SPX) Jan 13, 2022
The days of the U.S.-Soviet Space Race are over, and the domain of space exploration is expanding daily to include more countries than ever before. With the advent of private companies such as Elon Musk's SpaceX, which aim to reduce the costs of space transportation, expeditions into our extraterrestrial surroundings are no longer limited to just two contenders. Though it may seem like we