Astronomy

An object thought to have come from another star has been seen entering the solar system at high speed, and is expected to whip around the sun in the coming months

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Two meteorological missions – Meteosat Third Generation Sounder-1 (MTG-S1) and the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission – have launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, US.

Both are world-class Earth observation missions developed with European partners to address scientific and societal challenges.  

The MTG-S1 satellite will generate a completely new type of data product, especially suited to nowcasting severe weather events, with three-dimensional views of the atmosphere. It is the second in the MTG constellation to be prepared for orbit and is equipped with the first European operational Infrared Sounder instrument.

Copernicus Sentinel-4 will be the first mission to monitor European air quality from geostationary orbit, providing hourly information that will transform how we predict air pollution across Europe, using its ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared light (UVN) spectrometer.

Our Red Planet explorers may encounter a peculiar threat.

SpaceX launched 27 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit today (July 2), on the 500th Falcon 9 rocket launch in the company's history.

Launching in 2028, China’s Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission could bring Red Planet rocks back to Earth as early as 2031—years ahead of competing U.S.-European efforts

Dolphins seem to “feel” their way across the sea with narrow, sweeping beams of sonar

Auroras may be visible from Alaska to New York as an incoming solar storm could spark geomagnetic storm conditions overnight.

Pictures of a distant supernova remnant show two concentric rings, providing clear evidence that exploding white dwarf stars go boom twice in the blink of an eye

Pictures of a distant supernova remnant show two concentric rings, providing clear evidence that exploding white dwarf stars go boom twice in the blink of an eye

AI can allow engineers to focus on artistry over technical details for drone shows

Astronomers have discovered the first evidence of a white dwarf wiped out by a double-detonation supernova, also providing space-lovers with stunning eye-candy.

An interstellar expanse of glowing gas and obscuring dust presents

Why does the Moon have two different faces?. That question frames the lunar dichotomy: The nearside that faces us is different than the lunar farside. Scientists have worked hard to understand why that is, and new research says that the presence of certain minerals could explain why.

The Japanese company ispace released the technical details that likely doomed the landing of their Hakuto-R Mission 2 lunar lander earlier this month. According to a press release, their engineers narrowed down the issue to a failure of the spacecraft's Laser Range Finder (LRF). Engineers suspect that the LRF's performance deteriorated during flight, causing it to be slow to make its measurements and update its descent speed correctly. It hit the Moon at 42 meters a second, crashing hard.

There’s nothing to get a scientist’s heart pumping like a good, old-fashioned statistical debate. When it comes to topics like finding Earth analogues or hints of a biosignature in an atmosphere, those statistical debates could have real world consequences, both for the assignment of additional observational resources, but also for humanity’s general understanding of itself in the Universe. A new paper from two prominent exoplanet hunters, David Kipping from Columbia and Björn Benneke from UCLA, argues that their colleagues in the field of exoplanet detection have been doing statistics all wrong for decades, and make a argument for how better to present their results to the public.

One of Webb’s strong points is its ability to directly image planets around another solar system. The telescope has been in operation for long enough now that a flood of those images are starting, as more and more systems come under the telescope’s gaze. One of those is described in a recent paper and press release from NASA. According to the paper, the planet in a nearby system is about the size of Saturn, which would make it the smallest planet ever found by direct observation.

Bones found at the site of an ancient fish-processing plant were used to genetically identify the species that went into a fish sauce, often known as garum, eaten throughout the Roman Empire