Space

NASA’s PUNCH constellation of small satellites predicted the arrival time of a solar eruption at Earth to within 30 minutes, in a first test of the mission’s space weather forecasting capability. The agency, which released the results on August 4, said that precision is about 10 times better than the current state of the art, […]

NASA has awarded Advanced Space a contract for CAPSTONE 02, a two-spacecraft demonstration mission in lunar orbit targeted for launch in 2027. The mission will test rendezvous and proximity operations in cislunar space, where a spacecraft moves under the combined gravitational influence of Earth and the Moon in trajectories known as three-body orbits, in support […]

The commercial spacecraft built to raise the orbit of NASA’s Swift observatory has slowed an uncontrolled spin after a week of thruster burns, and NASA says the mission may still be able to carry out the boost it was designed for. Katalyst Space’s LINK spacecraft was spinning at roughly 9 degrees per second; a series […]

An international geodesy working group has released the first realization of a standardized lunar reference frame, a common coordinate system meant to support position, navigation, and timing for spacecraft operating around the Moon. The frame, designated ILuRF2026, combines three independent lunar ephemerides using a weighting method adapted from satellite navigation, and is described in a […]

NASA’s Curiosity rover has photographed a Martian valley floor covered in polygonal fractures, honeycomb-like shapes that extend in all directions as far as the rover can see. NASA said the field, spotted as Curiosity began climbing a valley nicknamed Valle Grande on Mount Sharp, is far larger than the small patches of similar shapes the […]

The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed exempting commercial launch and reentry licensing from requirements of 13 federal environmental and conservation laws, in a rule published in the Federal Register on July 30. The proposal invokes the Transportation Secretary’s statutory authority to waive requirements of U.S. laws for a license or permit when, after consulting the […]

A new theoretical analysis turns the absence of a specific kind of noise in the cosmic density field into the strongest constraints yet on gravitational waves produced in the early universe. The paper, posted to arXiv on July 29 by Gabriela Barenboim of the Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular at the University of Valencia and Albert […]

Spain’s Ministry of Defence plans a national satellite communications constellation under the European Union’s IRIS² program, with investment estimated at 1.6 billion to 2.0 billion euros, according to a ministry report presented at a government committee meeting on July 29. The report, prepared for a meeting of the National Committee for Technological Security and Sovereignty, […]

ESA’s reusable rocket demonstrator Themis has completed its first wet dress rehearsal on the launch pad at Esrange Space Center in Sweden, a milestone on the way to the vehicle’s first short test flight. The rehearsal on July 23 loaded the prototype with several metric tons of liquid nitrogen cooled to minus 200 degrees Celsius, […]

Astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array have detected polarized radio emission from the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst for the first time at centimeter wavelengths, and measured the rotation of that polarization in what they describe as the first detection of Faraday rotation in a burst environment. The work, submitted to the […]