#european-space-agency

#european-space-agency

In this handout image supplied by the European Space Agency on July 16, 2008, the Echus Chasma, one of the largest water source regions on Mars, is pictured from ESA's Mars Express.ESA/Getty Images Taking a picture of Mars is not easy.Once light bounces off the planet, it can take between 3 to 22 minutes to travel to Earth so there aren't truly "live" images of Mars.

Astronomers had long assumed that Saturn's distinctive rings formed around the same time as the planet some 4.5 billion years ago in the earliest days of our Solar System.That assumption received a serious challenge from a 2019 analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, suggesting that the rings were just 10 million to 100 million years ago-a mere blink of an eye on cosmic time scales.

An asteroid big enough to wipe out a city will travel harmlessly between Earth and the moon's orbit this weekend, missing both celestial bodies.aturday's close encounter will offer astronomers the chance to study a space rock from just over 100,000 miles away.That is less than half the distance from here to the moon, making it visible through binoculars and small telescopes.

An asteroid has lit up the sky over the Channel in the early morning after scientists accurately predicted its strike only the seventh time that has happened.The European Space Agency said on Sunday night that the 1-metre-sized object would enter Earth's atmosphere and strike the surface around the French city of Rouen.

Scientists are finally publishing all the details of what happened when a NASA spacecraft smashed into an asteroid to try to push it off course in September of 2022.MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Last September, NASA made history by knocking an asteroid off course.A mission called DART crashed a spacecraft the size of a golf cart into an asteroid the size of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

This imagery from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows the debris blasted from the surface of Dimorphos 285 hours after NASA's DART spacecraft smashed into the asteroid's surface.NASA/ESA/STScI/Hubble Astronomers are still watching that asteroid that NASA whacked with a spacecraft back in September, in the first-ever test of whether an asteroid could be deliberately pushed off-course.

An exhibition dedicated to the work of British architect Norman Foster has opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, showcasing drawings and original models produced by the architect over the last six decades.The exhibition, which according to the Norman Foster Foundation is the largest-ever retrospective display of Foster's work, features around 130 of the architect's projects including the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters, Hong Kong International Airport and Apple Park.

Space agency NASA has awarded construction company ICON a $57 million contract to develop 3D-printing technology to build roads, launchpads and homes on the moon's surface.The contract, worth $57.2 million (£47 million), was awarded to develop the 3D-printing construction technology that will be needed to build elements necessary for living on the moon, such as roads, launchpads and homes as part of a lunar base.

From dust we came, or so the saying goes.As scientists continue to render faraway primordial puffs with tools like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they're revealing a lot of new science about how planets are born.In a study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, astronomers showcase not one, not two, but three rings of debris around a hot and nearby star called Fomalhaut, located just 25 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the southern constellation Piscis Austrinus.

In recent decades, NASA has sent large spacecraft-Galileo and Cassini, respectively-to fly around Jupiter and Venus to explore the dozens of moons that exist in those planetary systems.The spacecraft investigated all manner of intriguing moons, from little radiation-saturated hellholes to a world covered in volcanoes.

A consortium of nearly every major European satellite company announced Tuesday that it plans to bid for a proposed satellite constellation to provide global communications.Essentially, such a constellation would provide the European Union with connectivity from low-Earth orbit similar to what SpaceX's Starlink offers.

Less than two years ago, China took a small but significant step in its goal of becoming a space power.For the first time, the Asian giant sent a robotic spaceship to Oceanus Procellarum (Latin for Ocean of Storms), a vast lunar mare that looks like a huge dark spot from Earth.According to the China National Space Administration, it is the youngest terrain on the Moon.

Tiny glass beads strewn across the moon's surface contain potentially billions of tonnes of water that could be extracted and used by astronauts on future lunar missions, researchers say.The discovery is thought to be one of the most important breakthroughs yet for space agencies that have set their sights on building bases on the moon, as it means there could be a highly accessible source of not only water but also hydrogen and oxygen.

A panel of women astronomers debuted a gorgeous view of the Universe when they started NASA's Tuesday keynote panel at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference.They unveiled the latest dazzling sight of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a star about to go supernova whose light took about 15,000 years to reach us.

Spin Kick
Last year, NASA rammed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft into a tiny moonlet called Dimorphos, demonstrating a promising way to redirect a potential incoming killer asteroid to save life on Earth.Now, given the huge amount of scrutiny following the collision, scientists have made another surprising discovery: Dimorphos' much larger companion Didymos is spinning so fast, they say, that it's capable of shooting pieces of rubble into space, a puzzling conclusion that highlights the fact that asteroids aren't necessarily the inert lumps of rock they're often thought of, Scientific American reports.

A rock two-feet-wide last week hurtled toward Earth at 27,000 miles per hour - and exploded with an energy equivalent to eight tons of TNT into pieces that rained over McAllen, Texas.(That's 0.6 metres wide and 43,000 km per hour for you metric folks)
America's National Weather Service said a Geostationary Lightning Mapper instrument aboard one of its satellites detected a bright flash at around 17​​23 CST (2323 UTC) on February 15 over Southern Texas.

Astronomers found several candidates for hefty galaxies in the early Universe, including one with a possible stellar mass equivalent to 1 billion times that of the Sun.They appeared to the team as bright red "pinpricks" in a patch of sky the size of a marker dot drawn on a thumb held out at arm's length.

Scientists have been given an unprecedented glimpse into the birth of stars and the early stages of the universe, after a new image was released by the James Webb space telescope.The image shows a young cluster of stars, known as NGC 346, which is more than 200,000 light years from Earth.Scientists have taken a particular interest in the cluster, which is in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), because it resembles the conditions of the early universe when star formation was at its peak.

In the James Webb Space Telescope's newest image, a pair of galaxies are smashing together, triggering waves of new star formation.And in the bright heart of the collision, we may be witnessing the birth of a new supermassive black hole.Around 270 million light years away, it's hard to tell where one galaxy ends and the other begins.

Sar2667 fell near the English Channel last night - and left a spectacular sight for stargazers



Anyone who happened to be up at 3am last night and looking up at the night sky might well have witnessed an exceptionally strange (and totally dazzling) sight indeed.An asteroid crashed into the earth and exploded mid-air, with the results being visible in areas of south England, Wales and northern France.

An asteroid illuminated the night sky over the English Channel on Feb. 13, as seen in Twitter videos taken in different cities across the south of England.(Video: Twitter @KadeFlowers/@fc_kova via Reuters)
An asteroid entered the Earth's atmosphere and burned up over the English Channel early Monday, in a colorful display captured by many residents under its path.

Design studio PriestmanGoode has collaborated with startup Skyted on a mask that uses jet-engine technology to absorb the wearer's voice so they can make calls in public without being overheard.The prototype mask, which was unveiled at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show ( CES), is designed to absorb up to 80 per cent of voice sounds.

Not a lot of people have heard of Spaceport Cornwall in the U.K., but last night more than 2,000 paying ticket holders showed up there to watch what was supposed to be the first orbital space launch from British soil.The payload: nine different satellites from both the military and the private sector.

Cosmic Girl, a Boeing 747 modified to carry the LauncherOne rocket under its left wing, took off from the new Cornwall Spaceport in Newquay, U.K., Monday night.The craft is seen here hours before taking off.Matthew Horwood/Getty Images The rocket was set to make history, carrying satellites on what would be the first-ever orbital launch from the U.K. on Monday night.

The UK's new disability minister has admitted the government "has scope to do better" when it comes to getting disabled people into work.Tom Pursglove, Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work, made the comment while announcing a new Disability Action Plan.He is the third MP to hold the position in as many months.

Stone Tools
If you're hoping for NASA's most advanced Mars rovers to detect life on the Red Planet, you'll probably have to hold out until some samples make it back to Earth.Take a new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, that had researchers investigate the capabilities of instruments used on Mars rovers by putting them through the wringer right here on Earth - with eyebrow-raising conclusions.

This image provided by NASA and the European Space Agency shows images of six candidate massive galaxies, seen 500-800 million years after the Big Bang.AP Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the Big Bang, suggesting the early universe may have had a stellar fast-track that produced these monsters.

The NASA Perseverance rover recently analyzed a trove of Martian rocks that seem oddly familiar - like where volcanic flows meet the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii, or where they meet the Atlantic Ocean in Iceland.This area, called the Séítah formation, is the scene of the newest investigation into the water that likely washed through this region billions of years ago.

The skies of Britain and Ireland were painted in green, purple and deep red Sunday night, as the spectacular auroras, typical of remote latitudes, became visible as south as Kent or Cornwall.Some Britons managed to get a glimpse of the colorful glow of the northern lights from their homes, something that usually requires long travels and overnight camping in ice-covered strips of Greenland or Iceland, or the northern parts of Scandinavia.

NASA got its giant Space Launch System off the ground for the first time in 2022, lighting up the night in Florida with an incredible stream of flame as it carried the Artemis I mission toward the moon.That shifted attention to SpaceX, which is building a next generation rocket, Starship, that is also central to NASA's crewed Artemis III moon landing attempt.

NASA got its giant Space Launch System off the ground for the first time in 2022, lighting up the night in Florida with an incredible stream of flame as it carried the Artemis I mission toward the moon.That shifted attention to SpaceX, which is building a next generation rocket, Starship, that is also central to NASA's crewed Artemis III moon landing attempt.

NASA's Orion spacecraft reached the farthest outbound point in its journey from Earth on Monday, a distance of more than 430,000 km from humanity's home world.This is nearly double the distance between Earth and the Moon and is farther than the Apollo capsule traveled during NASA's lunar missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

So far, NASA's ambitious Artemis I mission seems to be going swimmingly.The Orion spacecraft has performed a number of propulsive burns, flying smoothly past the Moon, and will now test out its capabilities in deep space.On Monday evening, after flying around the Moon, the spacecraft returned images of the flyby back to Earth via the Deep Space Network.