Science

WASHINGTON — NASA and Boeing have pushed back the first crewed launch of the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft with astronauts on board until at least late July because of certification paperwork that has taken longer than expected to complete. In a call with reporters March 29, officials said they had rescheduled the Crew Flight Test

TAMPA, Fla. — SES confirmed March 29 it is in talks about potentially merging with rival satellite operator Intelsat.  “At this stage, there can be no certainty that a transaction would materialise,” SES said in a brief statement. Both companies have previously acknowledged paying close attention to a wave of consolidation sweeping across their industry.

Before and after: example of image denoising as applied to atomic resolution imaging of a gold nanoparticle. On the left is the original experimental data as captured. On the right is the same image after reconstruction with the proposed algorithm. The data were acquired at low-dose (372 electrons/pixel). The reconstructed image is now practically noise

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin is establishing a new company that will offer communications and navigation services for what it foresees to be a growing number of government and commercial lunar missions. Lockheed announced March 28 the creation of Crescent Space Services LLC, a subsidiary that will offer a service called Parsec, a network of satellites

WASHINGTON — The Department of the Air Force has received no official communication from the White House regarding the relocation of U.S. Space Command’s headquarters, Secretary Frank Kendall told lawmakers March 28. The contentious issue of where Space Command’s headquarters will be permanently located came up during a hearing of the House Appropriations Committe’s defense

Reactor reactions: the SNO+ detector has seen antineutrinos from distant reactors when it was filled with pure water. (Courtesy: SNO+) For the first time, pure water has been used to detect low-energy antineutrinos produced by nuclear reactors. The work was done by the international SNO+ collaboration and could lead to safe and affordable new ways

WASHINGTON — Several military allies of the United States in the Middle East have expressed interest in creating their own space forces, and have sought advice from the U.S. on how to accomplish this goal, Col. Christopher Putman, commander of U.S. Space Forces Central, said March 27. “We have a lot of nations that see

TAMPA, Fla. — OneWeb is turning its attention to finalizing ground stations after launching a final batch of satellites needed to provide broadband services globally, executive chair Sunil Mittal said March 27. Mittal said the British operator has rolled out “most of the critical ground stations” required to launch commercially across all markets it has

Robert P Crease reveals what Physics World readers told him about whether we should airbrush out physicists who’ve done bad things in the past – and what he thinks Struck out Are there now three states for Schrödinger’s cat: alive, dead and cancelled? (Courtesy: Alison Tovey) Strike Einstein’s name from his work! Smash Eddington’s plaques!

WASHINGTON — A tight launch market, coupled with high inflation, has driven up launch prices in the last year, putting a squeeze on customers. At the recent Satellite 2023 conference, industry officials said they saw evidence of growing prices in the last year. Growing demand along with a constrained near-term supply that some have dubbed

WASHINGTON — The Canadian government formally committed March 24 to an extension of the International Space Station to 2030, joining other Western partners but not Russia. As part of a summit meeting in Ottawa between Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden, the two governments confirmed that Canada would participate in the ISS

Researchers from Wuyi University in China have developed a smart bionic finger capable of subsurface tactile tomography. While previous artificial sensors could only recognize external features, the new system can identify the internal shapes and textures of complex layered objects by simply touching their exterior surfaces. It then transmits the surface and subsurface data to

WASHINGTON — The Space Systems Command announced March 24 it has selected 18 vendors to provide data analytics and software services to help decision makers analyze information about the space domain. The companies are Agility Consulting, August Schell Enterprises, Avantus Federal, BAE Systems, Bluestaq, C3 AI, Enlighten IT Consulting, Ernst & Young, Kinetica, MAG Aerospace.,

WASHINGTON — ABL Space Systems, a California-based launch startup, announced March 24 it has secured a $60 million contract from the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Air Force that also includes matching funds from private investors, a type of agreement known as strategic funding increase, or STRATFI.  The contract is for ground and flight demonstrations

From Ferris wheels to fermions, Pradeep Niroula highlights the highs and lows of the annual physicist pilgrimage that is the APS March Meeting Viva Las Vegas Despite its Venice-style waterways and many temptations, physicists visiting Sin City earlier this month were enticed by 12-minute physics talks, rather than the rows upon rows of slot machines.

WASHINGTON — Blue Origin says it is preparing to resume flights of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle after completing an investigation into a failed launch last September. Blue Origin announced March 24 that its investigation into the NS-23 launch concluded that the nozzle in the BE-3PM engine in the rocket’s propulsion module suffered a structural

HELSINKI — An agreement for a United Arab Emirates’ rover to fly on China’s Chang’e-7 lunar mission has apparently been hit by U.S. export control rules. China and the UAE signed a memorandum of understanding for the Rashid II rover to fly on lander of the multi-spacecraft Chang’e-7 mission in September 2022.  However, that agreement

Alien probe: researchers are looking for a meteorite in the ocean because they believe it may have come from outside of the solar system. (Courtesy: Navicore/CC BY 3.0) One of my favourite popular physics books is The Second Kind of Impossible: the Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter by Paul Steinhardt (read my