Science

WASHINGTON — Firefly Aerospace has hired a former U.S. Air Force officer to lead a rebranded subsidiary responsible for sales of its launch vehicles and other capabilities to government and commercial customers. Firefly announced Nov. 3 that it hired Jason Mello to be president of Firefly Space Transportation Services (STS), a subsidiary responsible for sales

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, offline for more than a week because of an issue with its instruments, is likely to remain out of service for another week as engineers investigate the problem. Hubble’s science instruments went into a safe mode early Oct. 25 after they issued error codes indicating the loss of “synchronization

Core of the matter: can elements be synthesized deep within the Earth? (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Johan Swanepoel) Creating elements lighter than iron might not require the extreme conditions found inside very massive stars. According to a group of physicists in Japan and Canada, it is possible that oxygen, nitrogen and all other elements with atomic numbers up

WASHINGTON — Redwire, a company built up by acquiring a series of space technology companies, has purchased space biotechnology company Techshot. Redwire announced Nov. 2 that it had purchased Techshot, an Indiana-based company that develops biotechnology payloads for microgravity research. Redwire declined to disclose the terms of the sale. Techshot was founded by Mark Deuser

TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon has signed a multi-launch deal with rocket developer ABL Space Systems, which plans to loft two prototype satellites for its Project Kuiper broadband megaconstellation next year. ABL Space Systems aims to place the KuiperSat-1 and Kuiper-Sat-2 prototypes in low Earth orbit (LEO) by the fourth quarter of 2022 with its small

Noisy measurement: Koen Bastiaans in the lab at the University of Leiden. (Courtesy: University of Leiden) The most direct evidence so far that Cooper pairs of electrons can exist in a material above the critical temperature for superconductivity has been claimed by Koen Bastiaans and Milan Allan of Leiden University in the Netherlands and colleagues.

USSF-57 is the third U.S. national security launch to be added to the Falcon Heavy’s crowded 2022 manifest WASHINGTON — Two U.S. Space Force missions on Falcon Heavy rockets that had been scheduled for 2021 have slipped into next year. There is now a third U.S. national security launch that will be added to the

HELSINKI — Rocket Pi of China has signed a deal with a liquid rocket engine maker for supply of engines to power its Darwin-1 reusable launch vehicle. The deal, announced by methane-liquid oxygen engine maker Jiuzhou Yunjian Oct. 30, is for Lingyun-70, 70-ton (sea level) thrust engines with deep throttling capabilities and 12.5-ton (vacuum) thrust

Healing process: this X-ray tomography visualization shows a top-down view of two quasicrystals as they start to meld together during cooling. (Courtesy: Shahani Group/University of Michigan) A new way to grow large, defect-free quasicrystals has been developed by researchers in the US. Through a combination of experiments and simulations, Ashwin Shahani and colleagues at the

TAMPA, Fla. — Indonesia has ordered a high-throughput communications satellite from Thales Alenia Space for a 2024 delivery to fill a gap left by last year’s loss of Nusantara-2 to a Chinese launch failure. The satellite, dubbed HTS 113BT, will be operated in geostationary orbit by Telkomsat, a subsidiary of Indonesian state-owned telecoms operator Telkom

DUBAI, U.A.E. — Poor weather at locations in the Atlantic that could be used for Crew Dragon aborts will delay the launch of the next commercial crew mission to the International Space Station by three days. NASA announced early Oct. 30 that it was postponing the launch of the Crew-3 mission that has been scheduled

Taken from the October 2021 issue of Physics World where it first appeared under the headline “The climate-change outsider”. Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app. Sidney Perkowitz on Guy Callendar, the engineer who demonstrated the link between rising carbon-dioxide concentration and temperature but was dismissed

Maxar said in a statement it is “reviewing the new solicitation via OTA to determine what substantive changes have been made’ WASHINGTON — Maxar Technologies decided to challenge a Defense Department procurement of 126 satellites because of the financial burden the program imposed on contractors, the company said.  Maxar believed that the terms of the

TAMPA, Fla. — Exodus Orbitals, a startup developing software enabling customers to upload and run applications from orbit, is in talks about leasing satellites as plans to launch its own are delayed seven months to October 2022. The venture is adjusting its strategy to speed up the start of commercial operations as it seeks to

High and dry: the Mary Rose on exhibition in Portsmouth. (Courtesy: Geni/CC-BY-SA 4.0) Hailed as the favourite warship of England’s King Henry VIII, the Mary Rose sank during the Battle of the Solent in 1545. The wreck was rediscovered in 1971 and was raised 11 years later. The wood was impregnated with a polymer to

DUBAI, U.A.E. — A new, scaled-back version of a spending package released Oct. 28 sharply reduced the money allocated to NASA infrastructure and climate change projects, while continuing to exclude funding for a second Artemis lunar lander. The House released the text of the Build Back Better Act, a $1.75 trillion spending bill that is

DUBAI, U.A.E. — The space center responsible for the United Arab Emirates’ human spaceflight program is looking at a range of flight options for its astronaut corps. The U.A.E. currently has four astronauts, including two selected in April from a pool of more than 4,300 applicants. Only one, Hazzaa AlMansoori, has been in space, spending

No sterile neutrinos here: a component of MicroBooNE’s time projection chamber being installed. (Courtesy: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab) Neutrino physics has rarely been straightforward, and many surprises – and four Nobel prizes – have emerged in the 90 years since the particle was first proposed. Now, it looks like the first results from the MicroBooNE neutrino