Science

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

WASHINGTON — NASA confirmed July 17 that the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, with two astronauts on board, will return to Earth from the International Space Station in early August. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted that the agency current plans to have the Crew Dragon spacecraft, with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board, undock

HELSINKI — China is preparing to launch its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover next week with the rollout of the mission’s Long March 5 launch vehicle. The roughly 878-metric-ton heavy-lift Long March 5 was vertically transferred to its launch area at the coastal Wenchang Satellite Launch Center late Thursday Eastern.  The rollout indicates that China

Nature in all its glorious diversity has come up with some very clever solutions to difficult problems. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast the science writer Michael Allen talks about a longhorn beetle from southeast Asia, whose ability to survive sizzling temperatures has inspired the creation of a highly reflective material that

WASHINGTON — NASA announced July 16 that it is delaying the launch of its largest-ever space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, by seven months to address both technical issues as well as the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Agency officials said in a media teleconference that the launch of JWST is now projected for