Science

WASHINGTON — A startup has raised a seed round of funding to develop customized satellites with the assistance of artificial intelligence as an alternative to standardized buses. Los Angeles-based Proteus Space announced Oct. 10 that it raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Moonshots Capital. Other investors participating in the round included Lavrock Ventures,

Top result: An artist’s impression of top-quark entanglement. The line between the particles emphasizes the non-separability of the top-quark pair, which is produced by LHC collisions and recorded by ATLAS. (Courtesy: Daniel Dominguez/CERN) Physicists working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN have observed entanglement between pairs of top quarks for the first time. The finding

WASHINGTON — A year after acquiring the assets of Masten Space Systems, Astrobotic has resumed flights of that company’s suborbital vehicle and plans to continue development of a larger rocket. Astrobotic announced Oct. 10 that it completed the first campaign of test flights by Xodiac, a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing vehicle, since acquiring it and other Masten

WASHINGTON — A radiator on the Russian segment of the International Space Station started leaking coolant Oct. 9, the third such incident involving Russian hardware at the station in less than a year. NASA said in a statement that flight controllers noticed flakes coming from one of two radiators on the Nauka module on the

Rare-earth elements are vital for the magnets found in electric cars, wind turbines and other parts of the “green economy”. But with uncertainties over the supply of these materials, James McKenzie reports on the importance of magnets that avoid rare earths entirely Time to get digging With geopolitical issues surrounding the mining of rare-earth elements, the search

Formed within wells indented into the stack of two different layered materials (a monolayer semiconductor and an anti-ferromagnetic crystal), the chiral quantum light emissions rise up out of the material and could be used for quantum information and communication applications. (Courtesy: Los Alamos National Laboratory) A new nanoscale device based on stacks of two-dimensional materials

WASHINGTON — The head of the Space Development Agency — a U.S. Space Force organization that uses unconventional procurement methods to acquire satellites and build a space network — is pushing back at critics who presumably don’t want the military acquisition culture to change, SDA’s director Derek Tournear said in a recent social media post.  “Recently,

WASHINGTON — When Russia launched the Luch Olymp K-2 geostationary spy satellite in March, analysts expected it would carry out signals intelligence-gathering missions much like its predecessor Luch Olymp-K-1 that has been in orbit since 2014.  Slingshot Aerospace, a space data analytics firm focused on spaceflight safety, this week unveiled data that shows that Russia’s

Raising the steaks: Suraj Sudera with the Perfecta grill (courtesy: Suraj Sudera) Artificial intelligence is already used in many walks of life and now engineer Suraj Sudera has applied it to cooking the perfect steak. After studying engineering at Aston University in the UK, Sudera worked on medical devices before turning his attention to grilling.

Updated 3:15 p.m. Eastern with social media posts from PLD Space. WASHINGTON — Spanish company PLD Space launched its first suborbital rocket Oct. 6, with the company calling the flight a success despite reaching a lower altitude than planned. The company’s Miura 1 rocket lifted off from the El Arenosillo Experimentation Centre, a test site

TAMPA, Fla. — United Launch Alliance launched two prototypes Oct. 6 for the more than 3,200 Project Kuiper broadband satellites Amazon plans to build and deploy over the next six years. An Atlas 5 rocket carrying the satellites lifted off 2:06 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and

Basement ring: the laser gyroscope. (Courtesy: K Ulrich Schreiber et al/Nature Photonics) After 30 years of painstaking development, researchers in Germany and New Zealand have unveiled a laser gyroscope that can track fluctuations in Earth’s rotation in near real time and accurate to several milliseconds. The technique is much simpler than current methods and could

WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic continued its monthly cadence of commercial suborbital spaceflights Oct. 6, carrying three customers that included the first person from Pakistan to go to space. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo vehicle, VSS Unity, took off from Spaceport America attached to its VMS Eve mothership at 11:28 a.m. Eastern. VSS Unity released from the plane

BAKU, Azerbaijan — The liftoff time for India’s historic Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander was shifted four seconds to avoid close approaches to other space objects. Chandrayaan-3 launched July 14 on a LVM-3 heavy-lift rocket from Satish Dhawan Space Centre into an initial highly-elliptical Earth orbit. This began a circuitous journey to the moon which culminated in

Cloud expert: Lubna Dada and colleagues have found that sesquiterpenes have the potential to play an important role in cloud formation. (Courtesy: Paul Scherrer Institute/Markus Fischer) A family of organic compounds released by trees could play a far greater role in cloud formation than previously thought. That is the conclusion of Lubna Dada at Switzerland’s

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force on Oct. 4 released two solicitations for the next round of national security launch contracts, known as National Security Space Launch Phase 3. NSSL Phase 3 is a multibillion-dollar procurement of launch services projected for 2025 through 2034. United Launch Alliance and SpaceX won NSSL Phase 2 in 2020,

BAKU, Azerbaijan — Japan’s SLIM spacecraft has completed a flyby of the moon as part of a months-long deep space journey to set up a lunar landing attempt. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) lander made its closest approach to the moon at 2:47 a.m. Eastern, Oct. 4. It passed just under 5,000 kilometers