With more than 100 global leaders at COP26 having pledged to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by the end of the decade to help address the climate crisis, the health of the world’s forests is high on the political agenda. ESA’s Biomass mission will soon play a key role in delivering novel information about the of the state of our forests, how they are changing over time, and advance our knowledge of the carbon cycle. With launch scheduled for 2023, the mission is now in its last phases of development, having recently passed several key milestones.

Children of the world join Europe’s mission to Jupiter

We received astounding works of art from kids in 63 countries who put their personal touch on Europe’s mission to the largest planet in our Solar System, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE).

A telecommunications satellite that can be reprogrammed in-orbit, offering unprecedented mission reconfiguration capacity, has successfully passed its in-orbit acceptance review.

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
The U.S. Fusion Outreach Team, a grassroots organization in the fusion community focused on reducing barriers to outreach efforts, has launched a new centralized website to engage an expanding workforce, media, educators, and the public in the journey toward a world powered by fusion energy. The U.S. fusion community has just completed a two year strategic planning process to focus on a bo

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
Future fusion reactors have a conundrum: maintain a plasma core that is hotter than the surface of the sun without melting the walls that contain the plasma. Fusion scientists refer to this challenge as "core-edge integration." Researchers working at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics have recently tackled this problem in two ways: the first aims to make the fusion core

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) from fusion reactions was achieved in the laboratory for the first time during an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) on Aug. 8, 2021. These results mark an 8-fold improvement over experiments conducted in spring 2021 and a 25-fold incr

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
The march towards fusion energy gain, required for commercial fusion energy, is not always visible. Progress occurs in fits and starts through experiments in national laboratories, universities, and more recently at private companies. Sam Wurzel, a Technology-to-Market Advisor at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), details and highlights this progress over the last 60 ye

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) Nov 11, 2021
Today, the next-generation Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-T successfully arrived at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to begin launch preparations. It is the third of four satellites in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s GOES-R weather satellite series built by Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] in Littleton, Colorado. GOES-T will help NOAA provide

Pittsburgh PA (SPX) Nov 15, 2021
Spacecraft have long used heat shields for protection during entry into planetary atmospheres. Future missions to the outer solar system will need more sophisticated materials than currently exist. The extreme heating conditions needed to study new shield materials are, however, very difficult to achieve experimentally on Earth. Scientists working at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at

Moscow (Sputnik) Nov 15, 2021
The station was hit by space debris earlier this year. A piece of space junk struck the Canadian remote robotic system, but the incident did not affect the operation of the device or the ISS in general. The International Space Station had to perform a manoeuvre in order to avoid a collision with space junk, left by the Chinese Fengyun-1C satellite, the Russian State Space Corporation Rosco