Tehran denies Khayyam satellite will be under Russian control, despite reported admission by Moscow
Russia has launched an Iranian satellite from Kazakhstan amid concerns it could be used for battlefield surveillance in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Iran has denied that the Khayyam satellite, which was delivered into orbit onboard a Soyuz rocket launched from Baikonur cosmodrome, would ever be under Russian control.
Continue reading...OneWeb, touted by Boris Johnson as a potential rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink, provides communications services
A satellite company part-owned by the British government is due to be taken over by an EU rival this week, dashing hopes of fostering a UK firm to rival Elon Musk’s Starlink following its taxpayer bailout at the height of the pandemic.
OneWeb, which provides services including broadband from its low-orbit satellites, will be taken over by one of its shareholders – the Paris-listed Eutelsat- in a deal that could be announced as early as Monday.
Continue reading...A new generation of detectors will be many times better at tracking discharges of the dangerous greenhouse gas
Last month, scientists working with data from Tropomi, a monitoring instrument onboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5 satellite, published some startling findings. Writing in the journal Science, the team reported that it had found about 1,800 instances of huge releases of methane (more than 25 tonnes an hour) into the atmosphere in 2019 and 2020. Two-thirds of these were from oil and gas facilities, with the leaks concentrated over the largest oil and gas basins across the world, as well as major transmission pipelines, the team said.
Launched in 2017, Tropomi has been a huge step forward for scientists researching methane, being the first instrument in space that can see plumes of methane emissions directly, says Lena Höglund-Isaksson, a methane researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis . For example, the instrument led to the discovery of huge methane leaks in Turkmenistan that researchers were not aware of before, she says.
Continue reading...Elon Musk’s firm says 80% of the satellites it launched last week are expected to burn up instead of reaching orbit
SpaceX will lose up to 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched last week as the result of a geomagnetic storm, the company has announced.
Elon Musk’s firm launched the satellites into low-Earth orbit on 3 February from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but 80% of them are now expected to burn up instead of reaching their intended orbit.
Continue reading...In the outermost parts of our islands, a new industry in satellites, rockets and launch ports is poised for take-off
In the next 12 months, Britain is expected to make a remarkable aerospace breakthrough. For the first time, a satellite will be fired into orbit from a launch pad in the United Kingdom.
It will be a historic moment – though exactly where this grand adventure will begin is not yet clear. A series of fledgling operations, backed by the UK Space Agency, are now competing to be the first to launch a satellite from British soil.
Continue reading...At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom
Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.
“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”
Continue reading...Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit reached space on Sunday, eight months after the first demonstration flight of its air-launched rocket system failed, the company said.
Related: Virgin Orbit looks into cause of LauncherOne test failure
Continue reading...Miniature satellites open up a world of technological possibility. But experts say they degrade the astronomical landscape
The natural serenity of the night sky is a touchstone for all of us. Everyone alive today looks at the same stars no matter where they are located on the planet. But the connection is more profound because, next to our brief lives, the stars are immortal. Shakespeare saw the same stars in the same patterns that we do. So did Galileo, Columbus, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra and the first human ancestor to look up in curiosity. The night sky is nothing short of our common human heritage.
Last year, however, something happened that might change that view for ever. On 23 May 2019, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX launched 60 small satellites from a single rocket. The satellites were the first in what is planned to be a “megaconstellation” of thousands of satellites that will bring internet coverage to the entire planet.
Continue reading...Launch of projectile from satellite into orbit ‘threatens the peaceful use of space’
The US and UK have accused Russia of testing an anti-satellite weapon in space, in the latest sign that a space-based arms race is heating up.
General John Raymond, the head of the new US Space Force, said the alleged test of a projectile, conducted on 15 July, was “further evidence of Russia’s continuing efforts to develop and test space-based systems, and consistent with the Kremlin’s published military doctrine to employ weapons that hold US and allied space assets at risk.”
Continue reading...Bid for 20% of OneWeb to replace Galileo after Brexit ‘looks like nationalism trumping industrial policy’
The UK government’s plan to invest hundreds of millions of pounds in a satellite broadband company has been described as “nonsensical” by experts, who say the company doesn’t even make the right type of satellite the country needs after Brexit.
The investment in OneWeb, first reported on Thursday night, is intended to mitigate against the UK losing access to the EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.
Continue reading...The Noor was launched by a three-stage rocket and, according to Iran officials, had reached a 425 km high orbit
Iran has claimed it has put its first military satellite into orbit, further raising tensions with the US at a time the two countries are already facing off in the Persian Gulf.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said the satellite “Noor” (Light) was in a 425km (264 miles) high orbit, after a successful launch. Iran launched its first civilian satellite in 2009.
Continue reading...ESA say its Aeolus Earth observation satellite fired thrusters to avoid crash
The European Space Agency has said it altered the trajectory of one of its observation satellites to avoid a collision with a craft operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“@ESA’s Aeolus Earth observation satellite fired its thrusters, moving it off a collision course with a @SpaceX satellite in their Starlink constellation,” the agency’s Twitter account said.
Continue reading...Blast-off makes China the third country after US and Russia to master sea launch technology
China has launched a rocket from a mobile platform at sea for the first time, sending five commercial satellites and two others containing experimental technology into space.
The Long March 11 rocket blasted off from a launch pad onboard a commercial ship in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Shandong province – the 306th Long March rocket launch, but the first one at sea.
Continue reading...Elon Musk’s Starlink internet satellites ‘have no public consensus and may impair view of the cosmos’
Mega constellations of human-made satellites could soon blight the view of the night sky, astronomers warned following the launch of Elon Musk’s Starlink probes last week.
The first 60 of an intended 12,000 satellites were successfully blasted into orbit on Thursday by Musk’s company, SpaceX, which plans to use them to beam internet communication from space down to Earth.
Continue reading...