Category Archives: Space

Planet Ceres is an ‘ocean world’ with sea water beneath surface, mission finds

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Dwarf planet, believed to be a barren space rock, has an ‘extensive reservoir’ of brine beneath its surface, images show

The dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday.

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface.

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Nasa to change ‘harmful’ and insensitive’ planet and galaxy nicknames

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Space agency says ‘certain cosmic nicknames are insensitive’ and vows to drop any reference to them

Nasa has signaled it is joining the social justice movement by changing unofficial and potentially contentious names used by the scientific community for distant cosmic objects and systems such as planets, galaxies and nebulae.

In a statement last week, the space agency said that as the “community works to identify and address systemic discrimination and inequality in all aspects of the field, it has become clear that certain cosmic nicknames are not only insensitive, but can be actively harmful”.

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Nasa astronauts aboard SpaceX capsule make first splashdown in 45 years

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Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley land off Florida after two-month voyage that was Nasa’s first crewed mission from home in nine years

US astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, who flew to the International Space Station in SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon, splashed down in the capsule in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday after a two-month voyage that was Nasa’s first crewed mission from home soil in nine years.

Behnken and Hurley left the station on Saturday and returned home to land in the waves off Florida’s Pensacola coast on schedule at 2.48pm ET following a 21-hour overnight journey aboard Crew Dragon “Endeavor.”

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Seeking life on Mars: Nasa prepares to launch its latest rover

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Perseverance mission aims to land on crater to search for possible microbial Martians

Nasa’s most sophisticated rover yet is due to blast off for Mars on a mission to answer one of the most profound questions: did life ever emerge on another planet?

Mission controllers have set their sights on the 28-mile-wide (45km) Jezero crater north of the planet’s equator. The landing site is one of the most promising spots for any microbial Martians to have been preserved in rock formed when the crater held a lake nine times larger than Loch Ness.

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Britain will respond to space threat from Russia and China – minister

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‘Provocative test of a weapon-like projectile’ from Russian satellite shows peaceful use of space is under threat, says defence secretary

Britain will boost its ability to handle threats posed by Russia and China in space as part of a foreign, security and defence policy review, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said.

“This week we have been reminded of the threat Russia poses to our national security with the provocative test of a weapon-like projectile from a satellite threatening the peaceful use of space,” Wallace wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, adding that China also posed a threat.

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US and Russia to hold talks on regulating militarisation of space

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  • US claims Russia tested satellite-launched weapon this month
  • Negotiators to meet in Vienna on Monday

US and Russian officials will meet in Vienna on Monday to discuss whether and how to regulate the militarisation of space, in the wake of an alleged Russian satellite-launched missile test.

The two governments agreed to hold a “space security exchange” in January, but the meeting was put off as a result of the pandemic.

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Britain and US accuse Russia of launching ‘weapon’ in space

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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.”

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Likely active volcanoes found on Venus, defying theory of dormant planet

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Researchers identify 37 ring-like structures known as coronae that are believed to be living volcanoes

Scientists have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that appear to have been recently active – and probably still are today – painting the picture of a geologically dynamic planet and not a dormant world as long thought.

The research focused on ring-like structures called coronae, caused by an upwelling of hot rock from deep within the planet’s interior, and provided compelling evidence of widespread recent tectonic and magma activity on Venus’s surface, researchers have said.

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Closest ever images of sun reveal it is covered in miniature flares

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Solar Orbiter images shot from between Venus and Mercury orbits show ‘campfires’ in corona

The closest ever images of the sun reveal its surface is speckled with “campfires”, miniature versions of the dramatic solar flares visible from Earth.

The observations, beamed back from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft, which is a joint Nasa and European Space Agency (ESA) mission, could help resolve why the sun’s atmosphere is so staggeringly hot compared to the surface – a central paradox in solar physics. Miniature flares have been proposed as a theoretical explanation for the so-called coronal heating problem, but until now no telescope has had a good enough resolution to observe the sun’s atmosphere in sufficient detail.

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Beyond Pluto: the hunt for our solar system’s new ninth planet

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Scientists think a planet larger than Earth lurks in the far reaches of the solar system. Now a new telescope could confirm their belief and change solar system science

You’d think that if you found the first evidence that a planet larger than the Earth was lurking unseen in the furthest reaches of our solar system, it would be a big moment. It would make you one of only a small handful of people in all of history to have discovered such a thing.

But for astronomer Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, it was a much quieter affair. “It wasn’t like there was a eureka moment,” he says. “The evidence just built up slowly.”

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‘We’ve bought the wrong satellites’: UK tech gamble baffles experts

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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.

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Drain brain: Nasa offers prize money for best lunar loo design

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Agency hopes to attract novel solutions for its Artemis mission to the moon in 2024

“It certainly isn’t the prime focus of the mission,” said Nasa’s Mike Interbartolo. “We’re not going back to the moon so we can say we pooped on the moon, but we don’t want an Apollo situation either.”

Interbartolo, is project manager for the Lunar Loo Challenge, a Nasa competition launched on Thursday that hopes to attract new and innovative solutions to the problem of capturing and containing human waste in space.

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Rare ‘ring of fire’ annular solar eclipse to cast shadow over Africa and Asia

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Event will be visible across a narrow band from Congo-Brazzaville to southern China

Skywatchers along a narrow band from west Africa to the Arabian peninsula, India and southern China will witness the most dramatic “ring of fire” solar eclipse in years on Sunday.

Annular eclipses occur when the moon passes between Earth and the sun, but not quite close enough to our planet to completely obscure the sun’s light.

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Astronomers warn ‘wilderness’ of southern night sky at risk from SpaceX satellites

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Stargazing under threat as pristine skies over New Zealand and Australia are clogged with hundreds of Starlink satellites

Astronomers in the southern hemisphere have warned that the wonders of the night sky are at risk from hundreds of satellites that have been shot into space by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX.

The night skies of Australia and New Zealand are globally renowned for their clarity, drawing tourists from across the world to dark-sky sanctuaries such as Tekapo on New Zealand’s South Island and the Warrumbungle national park in New South Wales.

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SpaceX Dragon crew capsule docks at International Space Station

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  • A milestone for two Nasa astronauts in historic mission
  • First such rendezvous by US spacecraft since 2011

A mere 19 hours after blasting off from Florida, and with a short break for some Black Sabbath music in between, two Nasa astronauts docked the SpaceX Dragon crew capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday in another milestone moment for their historic mission.

Related: Trump wants America looking at the stars as he drags it through the gutter

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SpaceX successfully launches Nasa astronauts into orbit

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  • Donald Trump and Mike Pence witness launch in Florida
  • First attempt was cancelled minutes from blast-off

A rocketship named Dragon breathed new fire into America’s human spaceflight programme on Saturday, carrying two astronauts on a much-anticipated adventure.

Related: Trump wants America looking at the stars as he drags it through the gutter

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Trump wants America looking at the stars as he drags it through the gutter

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The president is due to attend the rescheduled launch of a manned SpaceX rocket – a welcome diversion from the coronavirus crisis

Making America great again just wasn’t enough. “President Trump is making space great again,” the Republican National Committee declared this week.

Donald Trump returns to Cape Canaveral in Florida on Saturday to witness the rescheduled launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying Nasa astronauts that was delayed by weather three days earlier.

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SpaceX-Nasa launch scrubbed due to poor weather

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The first crewed flight from US soil since 2011 was called off 16 minutes before lift off; the next opportunity is on Saturday

The United States’ long-anticipated return to human spaceflight will have to wait a few more days after poor weather forced mission managers to scrub Wednesday’s planned launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.

The first crewed flight from US soil since 2011 was called off 16min 53sec before the scheduled 4.33pm lift-off time, with SpaceX and Nasa officials blaming “strength of electric fields in the atmosphere”, translating to lightning near the launchpad.

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‘The big show’: US poised to return to human spaceflight with historic launch

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX, in partnership with Nasa, to launch Falcon 9 rocket from Florida carrying two American astronauts

In a historic moment a decade in the making, the skies above Florida will light up on Wednesday when the launch of a rocket born from a groundbreaking public-private partnership returns the United States to the business of human spaceflight.

Not since the retirement of Nasa’s space shuttle fleet in 2011 has the US possessed the capability to send its own astronauts into orbit, and the success of this week’s mission, formally known as SpaceX Demo-2, is likely to shape the direction of the space agency’s near-Earth ambitions for a generation.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch first astronauts from US soil since 2011

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Falcon 9 rocket to make history as billionaire seeks to commercialise space travel

Elon Musk’s SpaceX company hopes to make history on Wednesday by launching the first astronauts into space from US soil in nine years, as the billionaire takes the next step in his dream to commercialise space travel.

Donald Trump will be among the spectators at Kennedy space centre in Florida to witness the launch, which has been given the green light despite the coronavirus lockdown.

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