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It’s not every day that humans launch a space mission of such potential as it was done on Monday in Cape Canaveral, Florida. A SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket was launched on a quest to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa and reveal whether its vast hidden ocean might hold the keys to life. The mission will take the spacecraft Europa Clipper five and a half years to reach Jupiter, orbit around the Solar system’s largest planet and sneak close to its fourth largest moon, Europa. Associated Press reported: “Scientists are almost certain a deep, global ocean exists beneath Europa’s icy crust. And...

NASA is set to launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft to explore Europa, an ocean moon orbiting Jupiter. Europa Clipper’s launch is targeted for no earlier than Monday, Oct. 14, 2024 at 12:06 p.m. EDT (1606 UTC). The spacecraft, the largest NASA has ever built for a planetary mission, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Europa is one of the most promising places in our solar system to find an environment suitable for life beyond Earth. Evidence suggests that the ocean beneath Europa’s icy surface could contain the...

Ariane 6 first flight (Official broadcast) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0oFpOJaIYc

Just two weeks ago, the European Space Agency announced the discovery of a new black hole, the heaviest on the Milky Way, 33 times bigger than the Sun and 2,000 light years from Earth. Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Tsevi Mazeh, who was recently awarded the Israel Prize in physics, is among those responsible for the European Gaia spacecraft’s discovery. But if you ask him how excited he was that week, in which he both learned of his Israel prize award and his research on the new black was published, he’ll swiftly answer “The Israel prize wins bigtime.” “I cried a...

Since the launch of the Chandrayaan-3 mission on July 14, the ground stations of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) have been supporting Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to monitor the spacecraft’s health. “Since the launch of Chandrayaan-3, ESA has been supporting the mission by utilising two of the ground stations in the ESTRACK network to track the satellite in its orbit, receive telemetry from the spacecraft and forward it to the Mission Operations Centre in Bengaluru, and forward commands sent from Bengaluru to the flying satellite,” Ramesh Chellathurai, ground operations engineer at...

LIVE! SpaceX ESA EUCLID Launch this is a live stream launch is at 11:00 am

The Russian economy's industrial sector is in decline, according to air-pollution readings from satellites.A Wall Street Journal report showed that the decline may be worse than what Moscow officially reports.Pollution in Russia's industrial regions fell 1.2% in the six months to April, and is 6.2% lower annually.Russia's economy is suffering from an industrial decline as Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine drags on, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5P satellite.

The owner of an exotic animal breeding business in Florida has been sentenced to five years' probation for illegally selling a capuchin monkey to singer Chris Brown. A federal indictment doesn't name Brown, only identifying the buyer as a celebrity in California, but key details match an Associated Press report that wildlife agents seized the singer's pet monkey after serving a search warrant on his Los Angeles home in early January 2018. Brown also was identified in court Wednesday at the sentencing hearing in Florida for the monkey breeder, Jimmy Hammonds. Wildlife agents moved in after Brown shared a picture...

The European Space Agency (ESA) has begun preliminary technical discussions with Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could lead to the temporary use of its launchers after the Ukraine conflict blocked Western access to Russia’s Soyuz rockets. ... The political fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already been a boon for SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which has swept up other customers severing ties with Moscow’s increasingly isolated space sector.

It could be a coincidence—or it could foretell an historic Supreme Court term. The Court has now accepted two cases for this term that could threaten the essential legal underpinnings of the federal administrative state. The first is American Hospital Association v. Becerra, in which the plaintiff questions the Chevron doctrine—a rule fashioned by the Supreme Court itself in 1984 that requires lower federal courts to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of their delegated authorities, where the statute is ambiguous and the agency’s decision is “reasonable.” Under this rubric, lower federal courts have given administrative agencies wide leeway to interpret...

What a bad year to be a Florida manatee. For the first time on record, more than 1,000 of the sea mammals have died in a calendar year — and it’s not even December yet. That could amount to 1 in every 7 of the state’s manatees gone in less than 11 months. Many of them starved, thanks to a die-off of seagrass, a problem worsened by human-made pollution. In the short run, Florida owes it to this iconic mammal to find ways to mitigate the damage. It’s also time to put the manatees back on the endangered species list,...

The long-awaited launch of the nearly $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope is slipping at least four days, from December 18 to no earlier than December 22, after an incident during processing in French Guiana that briefly jostled the costly observatory.... ...The incident occurred in a processing facility at the Ariane 5 launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. A high-tension "clamp band," used to attach the telescope to an adapter that will, in turn, be mounted atop the rocket's upper stage, suddenly released on its own, briefly shaking the observatory....

The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed contracts for its first reusable space transportation system. Known as Space Rider, it is a robotic laboratory about the size of a couple of eight-seater minivans. ESA has signed two contracts. The first is for delivery of the spacecraft by co-prime contractors: Thales Alenia Space Italy and Avio. The second covers delivery of the ground segment (the infrastructure needed to launch and operate the Space Rider) by Italian co-prime contractors: Telespazio and Altec. Designed for launch on an ESA Vega-C rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, the Space Rider will stay in orbit for...

No, really. It has signed a contract to make this happen in 2025The European Space Agency has formalised its plan to dispose of space junk by using an orbiting claw to grab an old bit of rocket before dragging both the claw and the junk to a fiery doom.The agency announced the plan in late 2019 when it revealed it had asked Swiss startup ClearSpace to fully scope the mission.The paperwork was due in March and found favour with ESA's Ministerial Council, which has approved funding for an €86 million contract to fund the mission.The goal remains the same: fly...

The European Space Agency (ESA) signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Tuesday (Oct. 27) formalizing its collaboration on Gateway, a planned outpost in lunar orbit that NASA sees as key to its Artemis program of crewed moon exploration. Under this new agreement, ESA will provide Gateway with a habitation module and a refueling module, both of which the European agency will operate once the hardware is up and running. ESA contributions will also include two additional service modules for NASA's Orion capsule, the spacecraft that will launch Artemis astronauts from Earth atop the agency's Space Launch System (SLS) rockets....

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt Explanation: Can stars, like caterpillars, transform themselves into butterflies? No, but in the case of the Butterfly Nebula -- it sure looks like it. Though its wingspan covers over 3 light-years and its estimated surface temperature exceeds 200,000 degrees, C, the dying central star of NGC 6302, the featured planetary nebula, has become exceptionally hot, shining brightly in visible and ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by a dense torus of dust. This sharp close-up was recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope and is reprocessed here to show off...

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been attached to the top of the rocket that will send it toward the Red Planet this summer. Encased in the nose cone that will protect it during launch, the rover and the rest of the Mars 2020 spacecraft – the aeroshell, cruise stage, and descent stage – were affixed to a United Launch Alliance Atlas V booster on Tuesday, July 7, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Central Florida. The process began when a 60-ton hoist on the roof of the Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 lifted the nose cone,...

This illustration depicts the Sun-like star Kepler 51 and three giant planets that NASA's Kepler space telescope discovered in 2012–2014. These planets are all roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass. This means the planets have an extraordinarily low density, more like that of Styrofoam rather than rock or water, based on new Hubble Space Telescope observations. The planets may have formed much farther from their star and migrated inward. Now their puffed-up hydrogen/helium atmospheres are bleeding off into space. Eventually, much smaller planets might be left behind. The background starfield is correctly plotted as...

As NASA makes a big push to land humans on the moon's surface by 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) wants to learn more about the lunar caves that lie beneath. "Exploring and mapping these tubes could provide new information about the moon's geology, but they could also be an interesting option as long-term shelter for future human visitors to the moon," Franceso Sauro, director of ESA's Pangaea planetary geology astronaut training, said in a statement. "They would shield astronauts from cosmic radiation and micrometeorites and possibly provide access to icy water and other resources trapped underground." The missions have...

Wolf depredations on livestock in Idaho reached a record level during the past fiscal year, which ended June 30. From July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019, Idaho Wildlife Services conducted 264 depredation investigations related to wolf complaints from 136 livestock producers in 17 counties. Of those 264 investigations, 175 involved confirmed wolf depredations, said Todd Grimm, the Idaho state director of Wildlife Services, which is a federal agency that helps solve conflicts between humans and animals. “Last year we had a pretty busy year,” he said during the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board’s Aug. 21 meeting. “The cattle guys...