A spectacular Southern Lights display has been captured on camera from space. Nasa astronaut Jessica Meir filmed the timelapse from onboard the SpaceX Dragon shuttle. The Southern Lights are just as common as the Northern Lights, and regularly take place over Antarctica, but relatively few people live in latitudes close to the South Pole, so…
The seven astronauts on the International Space Station got a scare Friday morning when air leaks worsened in a Russian module. At about 9 a.m. Eastern time, NASA said the astronauts who had traveled to the I.S.S. in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule — two Americans, one Russian, one French — had been told to…
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WASHINGTON ― The loss of Space Force capabilities during Operation Epic Fury in Iran has highlighted the need for the service to invest in disaggregating its ground-based space operations centers and new “tactical” electronic warfare (EW) centers both at home and abroad, according to one of the service’s top budget planners. “We’ve seen in Operation…
DENVER ― The Space Force is pumping another $4.4 billion into its contracting pool for next-generation satellites to keep eyes on the heavens, bringing the previous ceiling for awards up from $1.8 billion to $6.2 billion. The service on Monday announced the plan to bolster its new Andromeda space-based space domain awareness program, explaining that…
Using MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team led by former MPIA (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany) PhD student Sebastian Zieba (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, USA) and Laura Kreidberg, MPIA Director and study PI (principal investigator), investigated the surface composition of…
WASHINGTON ― The Space Rapid Capabilities Office (Space RCO), in partnership with the Space Force’s innovation arm SpaceWERX, has awarded three small companies contracts worth $3 million each to develop new radar warning receivers to equip future highly maneuverable satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO). The awards to Assurance Technology Corporation, Raptor Dynamix and Innovative…
WASHINGTON ― Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman has taken to his bully pulpit to urge incremental development of new Space Force kit, calling on acquisition program offices to focus first on speedy delivery of “minimum viable capabilities.” While technically he hasn’t the power of the purse ― acquisition authority flows through the civilian…
The race to secure electricity for AI models has reached new heights: Meta has signed an agreement with the startup Overview Energy that could see a thousand satellites beam infrared light to solar farms that power data centers at night. In 2024, Meta’s data centers used more than 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity—roughly enough to power…
I’ve always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA’s picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. Yeah, I was in San Francisco and bored. And one of the things you did with boredom at that time was drop some acid…
