Just over two months into his Alpha mission, ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet has performed three spacewalks and supported numerous European and international experiments in microgravity. As the International Space Station crew embark on another busy month in low-Earth orbit, we reflect on some highlights from June.

Melbourne, Australia (The Coversation) Jul 07, 2021
Three astronauts on China's new space station have just performed the country's first space walk and are busy configuring the module for future crews. Named Tiangong ("heavenly palace"), the station is the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA)'s signature project to develop China's ambitions for having humans in orbit around Earth for a long amount of time. In planning since the late 1990s,

Boston MA (SPX) Jul 07, 2021
The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was one of the most brutal on record, producing an unprecedented 30 named storms. What's more, a record-tying 10 of those storms were characterized as rapidly intensifying - some throttling up by 100 miles per hour in under two days. To provide a more consistent watch over Earth's tropical belt where these storms form, NASA has launched a test satellite,

London, UK (SPX) Jul 07, 2021
Tantalising evidence has been uncovered for a mysterious population of "free-floating" planets, planets that may be alone in deep space, unbound to any host star. The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The study, led by Iain McDonald of the University of Manchester

Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain (SPX) Jul 07, 2021
Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), Arianna di Cintio, ha

San Antonio TX (SPX) Jul 07, 2021
Scientists have used data from the Southwest Research Institute-led Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission to explain the presence of energetic heavy elements in galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). GCRs are composed of fast-moving energetic particles, mostly hydrogen ions called protons, the lightest and most abundant elements in the universe. Scientists have long debated how trace amounts of heavy io

St. Louis MO (SPX) Jul 07, 2021
In 2011, scientists confirmed a suspicion: There was a split in the local cosmos. Samples of the solar wind brought back to Earth by the Genesis mission definitively determined oxygen isotopes in the sun differ from those found on Earth, the moon and the other planets and satellites in the solar system. Early in the solar system's history, material that would later coalesce into planets ha

Sendai, Japan (SPX) Jul 07, 2021
Scientists from Tohoku University and the University of Maryland have pinpointed the strong magnetic field of the early sun as the reason behind the radial variation of rock and metal in rocky planets' cores. This magnetic field, which pulled small iron grains inward, explains Mercury's big iron core and why Mars has so little iron in its core. The details of their research were published

Washington DC (SPX) Jul 07, 2021
A unique study of ancient diamonds has shown that the basic chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere which makes it suitable for life's explosion of diversity was laid down at least 2.7 billion years ago. Volatile gases conserved in diamonds found in ancient rocks were present in similar proportions to those found in today's mantle, which in turn indicates that there has been no fundamenta

Washington DC (UPI) Jul 6, 2021
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has begun to scout missions for the Perseverance rover, completing its ninth and most challenging flight yet. NASA announced the "most challenging flight yet" was a success Monday via Twitter. Flight nine included a speed record for the aircraft at roughly 11 mph, which NASA called "a high-speed flight across unfriendly terrain, which will take us