Science

If you built a very expensive telescope, would you hitch it to a balloon and fly it 40 km above the surface of the Earth? That is what Mohamed Shaaban at the University of Toronto and an international team will do next year when they launch their SuperBIT telescope on NASA’s superpressure balloon.  Shabaan explains

TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite broadband startup OneWeb has secured $300 million of strategic investment from Hanwha, the South Korean conglomerate with plans for its own megaconstellation. Hanwha bought an 8.8% stake in OneWeb through its defense division Hanwha Systems, which acquired British antenna startup Phasor Solutions last year as part of its growing space ambitions.

Any decision on whether to restart a rocket development will be driven by market opportunities HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — A year after discontinuing the development of its OmegA rocket, Northrop Grumman is not completely ruling out a future attempt to get back in the national security launch market, company executives said Aug. 11. “We do continue

Electronic paper using ambient light. Image: Marika Gugole/Chalmers University of Technology Thinking of taking your e-reader on holiday this summer? Sitting around in the sunshine catching up on all the books you haven’t had time to read may soon be even more enjoyable thanks to a new reflective screen technology that works without a backlight.

WASHINGTON — Spacesuits that NASA astronauts will need to walk on the moon won’t be ready in time to meet a 2024 lunar landing goal, NASA’s inspector general concluded. In an Aug. 10 report, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said the next-generation spacesuit the agency is developing for the Artemis program, known as the

WASHINGTON — A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket launched a Cygnus cargo spacecraft Aug. 10 carrying more than 3,700 kilograms of cargo for the International Space Station. The Antares 230+ rocket lifted off from Pad 0A at the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia, at 6:01 p.m. Eastern. The launch took place at the

New perspective: artist’s conception of X-ray flares being created in the vicinity of a black hole. X-ray flares originating from behind a black hole have been observed for the first time – by an international team led by Dan Wilkins at Stanford University in the US. The wavelength-shifted X-ray flashes are believed to have originated

HELSINKI — Chinese firm Space Transportation raised more than $46.3 million for its hypersonic spaceplane plans in a new funding round announced Monday. Space Transportation, full name Beijing Lingkong Tianxing Technology Co., Ltd., completed its third round of financing, securing more than 300 million yuan, according to a press release.  The funds will be used

There are now 11 vendors in the OSP-4 program that will compete for 20 missions over the next nine years HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — ABL Space Systems Corp, Astra Space and Relativity Space will join a pool of launch providers that are eligible to compete for missions awarded under the U.S. Space Force Orbital Services Program

HELSINKI — China’s main spacecraft maker is developing a human landing system for lunar missions, according to an account of an official academic visit. The brief news report from Xiamen University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics July 1 (Chinese) names individuals leading projects pertinent to China’s human lunar landing plans and notably refers to the

WASHINGTON — Boeing is continuing its investigation into the thruster issue that delayed the launch of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle but could soon run into schedule conflicts on both the International Space Station and with its launch vehicle. In an Aug. 6 statement, Boeing said it was continuing to study why several valves

Taken from the 2021 issue of Physics World Instrumentation and Vacuum Briefing, where it appeared under the headline “Listening to the rhythm of the climate”. You can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app. In February 2021 geophysicist Rob Abbott spent a week on the North Slope of Alaska, US, using a novel

In the 1964 Cold War satire, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” the United States, the Soviet Union and the rest of the soon-to-be-annihilated world learn the hard way that the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret. That line, delivered

WASHINGTON — NASA scientists and engineers are working to understand why the first sampling attempt by the Mars rover Perseverance failed to collect any material. In a statement late Aug. 6, NASA said that while Perseverance had drilled a sample from a rock on the floor of Jezero Crater, that sample did not make it

Taken from the August 2021 issue of Physics World. Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app. Building sandcastles is one of the little pleasures of a holiday on the beach, but what do you really know about the science of these structures? Ian Randall grabs his

WASHINGTON — The leaders of a NASA exoplanet mission are considering using a spare camera for a companion mission that would enable them to confirm existing discoveries and make new ones. NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April 2018 to perform an all-sky survey. The spacecraft’s four cameras observe regions of the sky

WASHINGTON — A NASA smallsat mission to test the orbit that will be used by the lunar Gateway will launch from New Zealand and not Virginia as originally planned. Rocket Lab announced Aug. 6 that it will launch the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission on an Electron rocket from