Space & Time

There are unexplored regions of the universe—and there are also unexplored times. In fact, there’s a nearly 400-million-year gap in our universe’s history that we’ve never seen: a time before stars known as the Dark Ages. To investigate that era, researchers want to pick up a particular radio signal that can’t be measured from Earth.

Lava worlds, massive exoplanets home to sparkling skies and roiling volcanic seas called magma oceans, are distinctly unlike the planets in our solar system.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers recently introduced the Space Infrastructure Act, which pursues a recommendation made by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission 2.0 to designate space as the 17th U.S. critical infrastructure sector. While it’s encouraging to see Congress considering this issue seriously, designating space as a critical infrastructure sector puts form over substance and would not actually address the risk posed by adversaries like China and Russia or from natural phenomena such as space weather. The post The Race for More Space: The flawed logic behind making space a 17th Critical Infrastructure appeared first on SpaceNews.

Gigatons of greenhouse gas are trapped under the seafloor, and that’s a good thing. Around the coasts of the continents, where slopes sink down into the sea, tiny cages of ice trap methane gas, preventing it from escaping and bubbling up into the atmosphere.

Nick Reese is the cofounder and managing partner of Frontier Foundry, a data and artificial intelligence company based in Washington. He was the director of emerging technology policy at the The post Space Critical Infrastructure: Breaking the Binary Debate and a Call for Space Council Action appeared first on SpaceNews.

Video: 00:03:20 ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen became commander of the International Space Station (ISS) on September 26, 2023, in a traditional ceremony in which the departing commander, Sergey Prokopyev, handed over the symbolic key of the Space Station. Mogensen is the sixth European to take on the role of ISS commander.Mogensen will serve as commander for the rest of his Huginn mission until early 2024. During his command, he will be responsible for overseeing the crew’s activities and ensuring the safety and operation of the Space Station.

The Giant Magellan Telescope begins the four-year process to fabricate and polish its seventh and final primary mirror, the last required to complete the telescope’s 368 square meter light collecting surface, the world’s largest and most challenging optics ever produced. Together, the mirrors will collect more light than any other telescope in existence, allowing humanity to unlock the secrets of the universe by providing detailed chemical analyses of celestial objects and their origin.

While the surface of the moon has been mapped in incredible detail over the last several decades, one region has eluded orbital cameras due to the lack of sunlight, which are aptly called the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the moon.

With excellent sensitivity and spatial and spectral resolutions, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) presents an unprecedented opportunity to promote our understanding of the evolutionary processes of galaxies.

In 1960, Freeman Dyson proposed how advanced civilizations could create megastructures that enclosed their system, allowing them to harness all of their star’s energy and multiplying the habitable space they could occupy. In 2015, the astronomical community was intrigued when the star KIC 8462852 (aka Tabby’s Star) began to dim inexplicably. While an analysis of the star’s light curve in 2018 revealed that the dimming pattern was more characteristic of dust than a solid structure, Tabby’s Star focused attention on the concept of megastructures and their associated technosignatures.

The ESA launched Gaia in 2013 with one overarching goal: to map more than one billion stars in the Milky Way. Its vast collection of data is frequently used in published research. Gaia is an ambitious mission, though it seldom makes headlines on its own.

A new paper entitled “Evolutionary Paths of Active Galactic Nuclei and Their Host Galaxies,” published on August 17, 2023, in Nature Astronomy, provides critical new insights on the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.

Astronomers have reported the discovery of a new galaxy using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the JWST COSMOS-Web survey. The newfound object, designated JWST-ER1 is a massive and compact quiescent galaxy. The findings were detailed in a paper published September 14 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Sierra Space has raised $290 million in a round led by Japanese investors, providing the company with additional funding to accelerate work on its Dream Chaser vehicle and commercial space stations. The post Sierra Space raises $290 million appeared first on SpaceNews.

Solar eclipses can have a noticeable impact on the structure and dynamics of Earth’s upper atmosphere—the ionosphere. This is primarily due to the sudden reduction in solar radiation reaching the Earth’s atmosphere during the eclipse. Since the ionosphere contains charged particles (ions and electrons) and is responsible for reflecting and refracting radio waves, changes to the ionosphere can also affect radio communications and navigation systems.

In 1963, Boeing heritage company Hughes Space and Communications launched into orbit a 78-pound satellite called Syncom that could receive signals from Earth and send those signals back down to The post Boeing’s Quantum Leap: Satellites in Record Time, Boosting National Security and Commercial Connectivity appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) marked the completion of an important step on the path to spacecraft assembly, test, and launch operations in late September 2023 at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland.

A new study of the intriguing TRAPPIST-1 exoplanetary system has demonstrated the complex interaction between the activity of the system’s star and its planetary features.

Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, will resign from the company in December and be replaced by Dave Limp, the Amazon executive who had been overseeing development of its Project Kuiper constellation. The post Blue Origin CEO Smith to step down appeared first on SpaceNews.

The MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle) team recently completed wind tunnel testing at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in a facility that has been a critical part of NASA missions going all the way back to the Apollo program.

Yahsat is considering expanding into new satellite markets after the UAE government made a $5.1 billion pledge to buy broadband services from the Emirati fleet operator until at least 2043. The post UAE’s $5 billion commitment opens doors for Yahsat  appeared first on SpaceNews.

On Sunday morning, a capsule the size of a mini-fridge dropped from the skies over western Utah, carrying a first-of-its-kind package: about 250 grams of dirt and dust plucked from the surface of an asteroid. As a candy-striped parachute billowed open to slow its freefall, the capsule plummeted down to the sand, slightly ahead of schedule.

Scientists have discovered a simple and reliable test for signs of past or present life on other planets — ‘the holy grail of astrobiology.’ Researchers report that, with 90% accuracy, their artificial intelligence-based method distinguished modern and ancient biological samples from those of abiotic origin.

In the high desert of Nevada, Elizabeth Silber watched NASA’s Sample Return Capsule from OSIRIS-REx descend into Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday, but unlike most scientists, she wasn’t there for the asteroid rocks.

Astroscale has signed an agreement with the U.S. Space Force to co-invest in an on-orbit refueling vehicle. The post U.S. Space Force and Astroscale to co-invest in a refueling satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.

Scientists have discovered a simple and reliable test for signs of past or present life on other planets—”the holy grail of astrobiology.”

Fungi in space have been a plot point in Star Trek: Discovery, but they are also a very real problem for astronauts and space stations. United Nations co-sponsored testing by a team from Macau in China subjected fungi to hypergravity with ESA’s fast-spinning centrifuge.

This image taken using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) shows Arp 107, a celestial object that includes a pair of galaxies in the midst of a collision. The larger object (left) is an extremely energetic type of galaxy called a Seyfert galaxy.

On Sept. 20, 2023, the On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) spacecraft bus arrived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, after its journey from a Maxar facility in California. Following this critical milestone, engineers at Goddard can begin to integrate the mission’s servicing payload onto the bus and begin to test the integrated spacecraft in simulated space environments.

SpaceX’s reusability juggernaut keeps rolling with a planned Space Coast launch Saturday night that would mark the 200th time the company has relied on a previously launched booster to get its payloads to space.

The face of astronomy is changing. Though narrow-field point-and-shoot astronomy still matters (JWST anyone?), large wide-field surveys promise to be the powerhouses of discovery in the coming decades, especially with the advent of machine learning.

In the quest to address fundamental questions about the nature of the universe and the search for extraterrestrial life, space has been an important frontier for human exploration. Microbes, among the earliest forms of life to appear on Earth, have survived the ravages of time, withstood inhospitable conditions and shaped the planet in unique ways, prompting research and intrigue about the plausibility that somewhere, some sort of microbial life might exist beyond Earth.

Astronomers have found a striking link between the amount of dust surrounding a supermassive black hole and the strength of the radio emission produced in extremely bright galaxies.

In a solar system called TRAPPIST-1, 40 light years from the sun, seven Earth-sized planets revolve around a cold star.

Astronomers have found a striking link between the amount of dust surrounding a supermassive black hole and the strength of the radio emission produced in extremely bright galaxies.

Space scientists have discovered a new process to test for life on Mars and on Earth, using cutting-edge technology to sequence DNA using the tiniest possible sample of DNA mass.

A trio of astrophysicists with Harvard and Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics has found via computer modeling that the likely reason for the warp and flare of the Milky Way galaxy is a tilt of the dark halo. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Jiwon Jesse Han, Charlie Conroy and Lars Hernquist describe their theories regarding the shape of the Milky Way galaxy and what their model showed.

Video: 00:05:46 ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen has begun his Huginn mission, turning the International Space Station into his home and workplace. After piloting on Crew Dragon Endurance as the first non-US pilot, Andreas has started performing European experiments and technology demonstrations with many more to come throughout the mission.

Mars is one of the most explored components of the solar system, yet there are always more discoveries to unveil on Earth’s planetary neighbor. On Earth we are able to take direct measurements to understand our planet’s meteorological activities, but on Mars scientists must use evidence in the landscape to discern this information instead.

Beijing’s government intends to support commercial aerospace and satellite constellations and applications in a plan to promote industries of the future. The post Beijing to foster commercial space and satellite constellations as key future industries appeared first on SpaceNews.

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected a new exoplanet orbiting a distant star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-1420 b, has an exceptionally low density. The finding is reported in a paper published September 18 on the pre-print server arXiv.

A seven-year space voyage came to its climactic end Sunday when a NASA capsule landed in the desert in the US state of Utah, carrying to Earth the largest asteroid samples ever collected.

Fungi in space have been a plot point in Star Trek: Discovery, but they are also a very real problem for astronauts and space stations. United Nations co-sponsored testing by a team from Macau in China subjected fungi to hypergravity with ESA’s fast-spinning centrifuge.

NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.

A capsule from a NASA spacecraft landed in the Utah desert Sept. 24, completing a seven-year mission to return samples from a near Earth asteroid. The post OSIRIS-REx sample capsule lands in Utah appeared first on SpaceNews.

The U.S. Space Force for the second time has taken ownership of a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellite to fill gaps in coverage for the U.S. military. The post Space Force gets another weather satellite from NOAA appeared first on SpaceNews.

After a slow start, the Commerce Department says it is making progress on establishing a civil space traffic coordination system that will rely on both commercial and government data. The post Office of Space Commerce touts progress on civil space traffic coordination system appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Department of the Air Force said that WGS-12 meets specific needs that cannot be met by commercial alternatives. The post Air Force validates Boeing’s new WGS satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.

A NASA spacecraft is on course to return samples from an asteroid to Earth in less than two days as teams prepare for a variety of both technical and fiscal contingencies. The post NASA ready for OSIRIS-REx sample return appeared first on SpaceNews.

Satellogic is relocating from Uruguay to the United States in a bid for more government business as revenues continue falling short of expectations, the publicly traded Earth observation operator announced Sept. 21. The post Satellogic relocating to the United States in search of government growth appeared first on SpaceNews.

With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are now able to peer so far back in time that we are approaching the epoch where we think that the first galaxies were created. Throughout most of the history of the Universe, galaxies seemingly tend to follow a tight relation between how many stars they have formed, and how many heavy elements they have formed. But for the first time we now see signs that this relation between the amount of stars and elements does not hold for the earliest galaxies. The reason is likely that these galaxies simply are in the process of being created, and have not yet had the time to create the heavy elements.

Galaxies from the early Universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the Universe, according to new research.

Astronomers using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have identified carbon dioxide in a specific region on the icy surface of Europa.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has introduced legislation that would extend a restriction on the Federal Aviation Administration’s ability to regulate commercial human spaceflight safety by another eight years. The post House Speaker introduces bill to extend commercial spaceflight regulatory learning period appeared first on SpaceNews.

Image: This summer, Europe experienced a relentless heatwave, fuelling wildfires in several countries. This Copernicus Sentinel-1 image shows the burn scars left by fires on the Greek island of Rhodes.

Sierra Space conducted another test of its inflatable habitat technology, demonstrating that the module exceeds its requirements even with the addition of a window in its fabric structure. The post Sierra Space tests inflatable module technology appeared first on SpaceNews.

WASHINGTON — True Anomaly, a space industry startup based in Denver, was awarded a $17.4 million contract by the U.S. Space Force to provide software tools to better understand the The post True Anomaly gets $17 million Space Force contract for space domain awareness software appeared first on SpaceNews.

NASA is delaying plans to move the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program to its next phase of development after an independent review found serious issues with its technical readiness, cost and schedule. The post NASA Mars Sample Return budget and schedule “unrealistic,” independent review concludes appeared first on SpaceNews.