Science

Hyvinkää, FINLAND — China’s Tianwen-1 Mars mission launched successfully Thursday, initiating a phase of deep space and interplanetary exploration. A Long March 5 rocket launched the Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center at 12:41 a.m. Eastern.  Successful Trans-Mars injection was confirmed around 40 minutes later by the China Aerospace Science and Technology

Quantum clock: rotating atomic spins have been used to measure the time it takes for quantum tunnelling to occur. (Courtesy: iStock/agsandrew) The time it takes for an atom to quantum-mechanically tunnel through an energy barrier has been measured by Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto and colleagues. The team observed ultracold atoms tunnelling through

SmallSat Alliance Chairman Chuck Beames said DoD’s decision to award contracts to six companies without a competition was a mistake. WASHINGTON — The Defense Department caused an uproar when it announced on June 18 it had selected six small launch companies to receive contracts funded under the Defense Production Act, the head of a space

The Air Force will use BlackSky’s monitoring service to track the spread of COVID-19 and secure its supply chain. WASHINGTON — Earth-observation company BlackSky announced July 21 it received a U.S. Air Force contract to monitor overseas U.S. military bases, detect outbreaks and analyze the spread of COVID-19. The contract was awarded by the Air

Microfluidics maestro: Cellular Highways chief executive Samson Rogers poses with a prototype of the company’s first commercial sell-sorting instrument. (Courtesy: Cellular Highways) Companies that use physics to unlock next-generation drugs for respiratory disorders and enable advanced cancer treatments are the first recipients of a new award for early-stage companies in healthcare and medicine. Nebu~Flow, a

Army Lt. Gen. Dickinson became deputy commander of U.S. Space Command in December 2019. He previously was the commander of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. WASHINGTON — The Senate Armed Services Committee has scheduled a July 28 hearing to consider the promotion of Army Lt. Gen. James Dickinson to general and his

Ximena Cid (second from left) stands with students in front of a mural on the CSUDH campus. Credit: CSUDH By Korena Di Roma Howley As a young girl growing up in Sacramento, California, Ximena Cid would sit on her roof and stare at the night sky. “I always had a love of the stars, of

WASHINGTON — Small launch vehicle developer Astra said July 20 it’s now planning to make its next orbital launch attempt in early August, five months after a previous attempt was scrubbed a minute before liftoff. The company announced on Twitter that the window for its Rocket 3.1 vehicle will open Aug. 2 from Pacific Spaceport

Heating up: artistic representation of how light is squeezed at room temperature. (Courtesy: Christine Daniloff/MIT) An optomechanical device that adjusts – or “squeezes” – the uncertainties in the quantum properties of laser light has been developed by Nancy Aggarwal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues. The team created their source of squeezed light

SpaceX’s customer for the Anasis-2 mission was Lockheed Martin on behalf of the government of South Korea. WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on July 20 launched Anasis-2, South Korea’s first military communications satellite. The rocket lifted off at 5:30 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Less than nine minutes after liftoff the Falcon

The Case for Fahrenheit vs Celsius in terms of human comfort.  By Allison Kubo Hutchison Scientists have to know how to speak the languages of many units. Improper unit conversions have caused much heartache and suffering in the past, including the loss of a $125 million dollar Mars orbiter. In general, peer-reviewed science journals only

WASHINGTON — Britain’s military on July 19 agreed to fully fund a gap-filler Skynet satellite it sole-sourced from Airbus Defence and Space three years ago, signing a 500-million-pound ($628.5 million) contract that covers the satellite’s manufacture and launch, as well as ground segment upgrades. Airbus Defence and Space will build the Skynet-6A satellite in the

The different lamellae that make up the bone samples studied and their nanostructural orientation. Courtesy: C Charnay A new X-ray technique has revealed hitherto unknown structures in human bone. The technique, which uses a synchrotron beam to map the 3D orientation of nanocrystals and nanostructures within a material, advances our understanding of bone structure and

WASHINGTON — A Japanese rocket launched the United Arab Emirates’ first mission to Mars July 19, an orbiter that will study the planet’s weather while demonstrating the country’s growing space capabilities. The H-2A rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 5:58 p.m. Eastern. The launch was originally scheduled for July 14

A tethered cubesat is projected to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up within six weeks whereas an untethered one could take up to nine years. WASHINGTON — Millennium Space Systems later this year will launch an experiment intended to show that a small satellite with a deployable tether can safely deorbit in a matter

Planet Nine is a hypothetical world in the far reaches of our Solar System. Proposed in 2016 by Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, its existence would explain the unusual orbits of certain Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). But are we completely sure that Planet Nine in fact a planet? A paper in September 2019

WASHINGTON — The federal government will soon allow U.S. commercial remote sensing companies to sell high-resolution satellite images of Israel, changing resolution limits that have been in place for more than two decades. In a draft of a Federal Register notice obtained by SpaceNews, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which hosts the office

Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, the leader of the U.S. Space Force, has been emphatic that the success of the service will depend on its technological might. “You will build the Space Force as the first digital service, and lay the foundation of a service that is innovative and can go fast,” Raymond told a group