Science

Big and small: illustration of how a tiny Bose–Einstein condensate has been used to simulate the expansion of space that occurred moments after the Big Bang. (Courtesy: Campbell McLauchlan) Unfortunately for the field of cosmology, there is only one universe. This makes performing experiments in the same way as other scientific fields quite a challenge.

This short video filmed at the Photonics West 2023 meeting features Martin Ruge from Hübner Photonics, who introduces the company’s C-WAVE product family of tunable and lockable laser light sources, which operate from 450 nm in the blue to 3.5 μm in the infrared. Ruge, who is global product manager of the C-WAVE tunable laser

Ultrafast laser camera: a, the kerosene flame studied in this work; b, optical signals induced when nanoparticles such as soot or PAH molecules in the flame interact with the nanosecond laser-sheet; c, schematic of the LS-CUP imaging system. (Courtesy: Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, Peng Wang, Florian Bauer, Yide Zhang, Dag Hanstorp, Stefan Will and Lihong V

WASHINGTON — Boeing has opened the production facility where it will build a new upper stage for an upgraded version of the Space Launch System. The company held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Feb. 13 at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans for what it calls the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) Gray Box, a portion of

Made for space: an Orbitrap cell. (Courtesy: Ricardo Arevalo) A compact prototype instrument that could one day search for signs of life in the solar system has been unveiled by a team of researchers in the US, France, and Germany. Led by Ricardo Arevalo at the University of Maryland, the team’s Orbitrap LDMS instrument can

WASHINGTON — Cobham Satcom will supply as many as 170 terminals to Inmarsat for the U.S. Navy Military Sealift Command, the company said. Inmarsat Government last year won a $578 million 10-year contract to maintain and operate the command’s communications infrastructure, including satellite systems, teleports and terrestrial services. Inmarsat also will upgrade the command’s ship-based

WASHINGTON — Virgin Orbit provided additional details about the likely cause of its LauncherOne failure last month but didn’t estimate when the vehicle will be ready to return to flight. In a Feb. 14 statement, the company elaborated on comments made a week earlier by its chief executive, Dan Hart, who said at the SmallSat

Controlled reaction: artists impression of two identical molecules colliding (left) to create an intermediate complex (centre). The complex sets off an interaction that changes the final state of the molecules (right). (Courtesy: Juliana Park) A way of colliding ultracold molecules while controlling the rate at which they react has been developed by physicists at the

WASHINGTON — Maxar has signed a contract with satellite imagery startup Umbra to get dedicated access to the company’s radar imaging constellation, the companies announced Feb. 14. The partnership will allow Maxar to directly task Umbra’s satellites and integrate synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data into its portfolio of Earth intelligence products and services, Tony Frazier,

TAMPA, Fla. — Canadian launch startup SpaceRyde has filed for bankruptcy just months after noise complaints put an end to rocket engine tests. The five-year-old company, which had been developing a rocket that would use a stratospheric balloon as its first stage, filed for bankruptcy Feb. 10 and named Deloitte as trustee to handle its

Nonlinear optical materials such as silicon can be used to make on-chip devices that break dynamic reciprocity. (Courtesy: K Xia) A new method for making devices that act like a “one-way street” for light has been developed by researchers in China and Japan. The technique, which breaks the limit of dynamic reciprocity in nonlinear optical

HELSINKI — Launches conducted by commercial Chinese launch service providers could more than double those attempted last year, according to firms’ plans for 2023. The more than 20 launches now planned by commercial launch service providers would notably eclipse the total number of orbital launches conducted by China in 2017, demonstrating the rapid growth in

WASHINGTON — Despite concerns about the viability of many new launch vehicle developers, many in the industry say those vehicles are needed as demand for launch outstrips supply. During a panel at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Feb. 9, spacecraft developers and launch integrators said that, even with the predictions of “bloodletting” among

Substandard: A report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, finds that NIST’s facilities in Maryland and Colorado fail to meet acceptable standards (courtesy: R. Jacobson/NIST). Labs belonging to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are in such a bad state that it is “severely” compromising the agency’s ability to function.

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Plasmos revealed plans to offer in-space transportation and to return payloads to Earth with a Space Truck. The Space Truck, powered by Plasmos’ dual-mode propulsion system, will transport payloads to altitudes as high as 1,400 kilometers “to enable in-space manufacturing, last-mile delivery, point-to-point transportation, on-orbit servicing and active debris removal,” Plamso

WASHINGTON — A Progress cargo spacecraft docked to the International Space Station experienced a coolant leak Feb. 11, the second such incident involving a Russian spacecraft at the station in less than two months. The Russian space agency Roscosmos reported a “depressurization” in the Progress MS-21 spacecraft shortly after another cargo spacecraft, Progress MS-22, docked

Sound return: The European Commission’s €1bn Quantum Technologies Flagship has already led to the creation of 25 spin-offs firms (courtesy: iStock/Quardia) Europe is leading the race to implement quantum-based technologies, according to a new report from the European Commission. The report examines the state of the 10-year €1bn Quantum Technologies Flagship programme, which began in

WASHINGTON — One NASA-funded lunar cubesat has recovered from a communications glitch while engineers are developing backup plans for another cubesat that has suffered a propulsion problem. NASA announced Feb. 8 that controllers had restored the ability to send commands to the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) cubesat. That cubesat,