WASHINGTON — Arianespace on Aug. 15 launched two communications satellites and a satellite servicer on an Ariane 5 rocket, completing the company’s first launch since the reopening of the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. Ariane 5 lifted off at 6:04 p.m. Eastern and deployed the spacecraft into geostationary transfer orbits over the course
Science
Recreating the Sun: the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator (Courtesy: Gwurden/CC BY-SA 4.0) A new mechanism that could reduce plasma turbulence in stellarators has been identified in computer simulations done by researchers in the US and Germany. A similar effect has already been predicted to occur in tokamaks, which like stellarators, confine hot plasmas using magnetic fields.
WASHINGTON — NASA announced Aug. 14 that the first operational SpaceX commercial crew mission to the International Space Station will launch in late October, a delay to accommodate other spacecraft flying to the station. The agency said it has set a date of no earlier than Oct. 23 for the Crew-1 launch, which will send
WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency is preparing to select two companies to build the second generation of Galileo navigation satellites under contracts to be signed in early 2021. The ESA-led competition, arranged on behalf of the European Commission, pits rising German manufacturer OHB against European heavyweights Thales Alenia Space and Airbus Defense and Space,
Hop to it: the grasshopper problem has been solved on a sphere. (Courtesy: Tomfriedel/ CC BY 3.0) A few years ago, the physicists Olga Goulko, Damián Pitalúa-García and Adrian Kent proposed the grasshopper problem. Think of a grasshopper that hops a fixed distance in a random direction. If the grasshopper begins at a random position
WASHINGTON — A startup formed by rocket engineers from the German space agency DLR is targeting late 2022 for the first flight of a small launch vehicle designed around hybrid engines. HyImpulse is developing a three-stage rocket capable of sending 500 kilograms to a 400-kilometer low Earth orbit. The 40-person company is bankrolled by Rudolf
Would you use a pick-up line composed by a machine-learning algorithm? Perhaps something like You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, which is a machine’s attempt at an amorous icebreaker and the title of a book by Janelle Shane. Shane is an optical engineer with a blog that chronicles the absurdities that are
The GEM 63XL motors will fly on ULA’s Vulcan Centaur rocket in 2021. WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman on Aug. 13 completed the first qualification test of a new strap-on rocket motor developed for United Launch Alliance’s future vehicle Vulcan Centaur, the company said. The static firing of the 63-inch-diameter graphite epoxy motor known as GEM
WASHINGTON — Mike Griffin, the former NASA administrator who stepped down as undersecretary of defense in July, has joined the board of directors of small launch vehicle company Rocket Lab as that company seeks to grow its government business. The company announced Aug. 12 that it added Griffin to its board, joining company founder Peter
By: Hannah Pell “Every time you turn around it seems that someone has published a new physics journal,” begins a Special Report in the August 1970 issue Physics Today. The report goes on to list more than 30 new physics and astronomy journals that started in 1968 and had been mentioned in the magazine within
No pairs: the first ‘open flavour’ tetraquark has been spotted at CERN (Courtesy: Shutterstock/paul_june) The first tetraquark composed of four quarks of different flavours has been discovered by physicists working on the LHCb experiment at CERN. Dubbed X(2900), the “open flavour” tetraquark has a mass of about 2.9 GeV/c2 and has been spotted in two spin
WASHINGTON — New Federal Communications Commission regulations will go into effect next week intended to make it easier for small satellites to get licenses for commercial operations. The FCC published in the Federal Register July 20 the final version of a new rule for what it calls “streamlined” licensing procedures for small satellites, which formally
As a wave of acquisitions washes over the space industry, NewSpace investors are finally finding the exits — just not where they expected them to be. The pace of space industry exits is picking up in the United States where private equity firms and holding companies are scooping up startups and enterprises established decades ago.
Taken from the August 2020 issue of Physics World. Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app. For the past 22 years, physicist Corey Gray has worked at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in Hanford, Washington. He spoke to Tushna Commissariat about building LIGO, the big detection,
ULA and SpaceX will fly military and intelligence satellites under Phase 2 of the National Security Space Launch starting in 2022. WASHINGTON — Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, received a phone call last Friday from the Air Force’s senior procurement executive Will Roper. “I was told by Roper that ULA was
WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab says it’s on track to test recovering an Electron booster later this year as it also improves the payload performance of the small launch vehicle. Rocket Lab announced last week it completed drop tests of a dummy Electron first stage at its New Zealand launch site, demonstrating that its parachute would
Party line: the new protocol allows 10 parties to share information securely. (Courtesy: University of Witwatersrand) A “quantum secret sharing” scheme that allows 10 parties share information securely – the highest number so far – has been developed and demonstrated by researchers in South Africa. The protocol involves each party performing quantum operations on the photon without
WASHINGTON — The coronavirus pandemic has slowed work on the first ViaSat-3 broadband satellite, making a launch in mid-2021 unlikely, Viasat CEO Mark Dankberg said Aug. 7. Speaking during an earnings call for the quarter ended June 30, Dankberg said the pandemic continued to weaken demand for inflight connectivity services, but did not have as