Denver CO (SPX) Mar 29, 2023
Crescent Space Services has announced its entry into the lunar infrastructure sector. Crescent Space is a new commercial company launched by Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) that provides infrastructure-as-a-service for lunar missions. As humankind expands its presence beyond low-Earth orbit, one of the first key challenges is uninterrupted communications between Earth, the Moon, and the growin

Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 30, 2023
NASA's Psyche mission, which will explore a metal-rich asteroid of the same name, is on track to launch in October 2023 after a one-year delay to complete critical testing. The launch period will open Oct. 5 and close Oct. 25. The asteroid, which lies in the outer portion of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may be the remains of a core of a planetesimal, a building block of a roc

Bay St. Louis MS (SPX) Mar 29, 2023
As NASA prepares for the first crewed Artemis missions to the Moon, agency propulsion and test teams are setting their sights on future Space Launch System (SLS) flights and working to improve one of the world's most powerful and reliable rocket engines for missions beginning with Artemis V. A series of hot fire certification tests is in progress at NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St.

Durham UK (SPX) Mar 29, 2023
A team of astronomers has discovered one of the biggest black holes ever found, taking advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. The team, led by Durham University, UK, used gravitational lensing - where a foreground galaxy bends the light from a more distant object and magnifies it - and supercomputer simulations on the DiRAC HPC facility, which enabled the team to closely e

Munich, Germany (SPX) Mar 30, 2023
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which ESO is a partner, astronomers have discovered a large reservoir of hot gas in the still-forming galaxy cluster around the Spiderweb galaxy - the most distant detection of such hot gas yet. Galaxy clusters are some of the largest objects known in the Universe and this result, published in Nature, further reveals just how earl

Minneapolis MN (SPX) Mar 21, 2023
University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers, along with a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), have developed a breakthrough process for making spintronic devices that has the potential to become the new industry standard for semiconductors chips that make up computers, smartphones, and many other electronics. The new process will allow for faster, more efficien

Washington DC (UPI) Mar 29, 2023
SpaceX's 21st launch of the year sent 56 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Wednesday afternoon. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at about 4 p.m., carrying 56 satellites into low-Earth orbit. The first stage booster successfully returned and landed on the "Just Read the Instructions" drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean about eight minutes after

Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 27, 2023
Due to some delayed downlink of images, we didn't receive all the information we needed in time to do contact science today. Although the data did eventually arrive, it was too late to allow us to get the arm out for contact science. Each planning day has a very strict timeline, in order to make our scheduled uplink time, which is MSL's allotted time for using the Deep Space Network to get

London, UK (SPX) Mar 29, 2023
Asteroids sharing their orbits with the planet Neptune have been observed to exist in a broad spectrum of red colour, implying the existence of two populations of asteroids in the region, according to a new study by an international team of researchers. The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. The team of scientists from the USA,

St Louis MO (SPX) Mar 30, 2023
Intrigued by reports of recent volcanic eruptions on Venus? WashU planetary scientists Paul Byrne and Rebecca Hahn want you to use their new map of 85,000 volcanoes on Venus to help locate the next active lava flow. "This paper provides the most comprehensive map of all volcanic edifices on Venus ever compiled," said Byrne, an associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts and