– News of October 8, 2019 – Between 2004 and 2017, the American spacecraft Cassini studied for the first time the Saturnian system from orbit. This prolonged mission made it possible to place a lander on Titan, to measure the rotation of Saturn or to show the amazing features of a tiny moon, Enceladus. With…
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– News of October 8, 2019 – The Juno space probe has just made a very long propulsive phase so as not to succumb to the shadow of Jupiter. It takes almost 12 hours to cross the Jovian night at orbital speed. 12 hours without sun is very long for a space probe that is…
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– News of 1st October 2019 – Ariane 6, the new launcher of Arianespace, continues the tests for its first flight scheduled for next year. The Vulcain 2.1 engine, which is to propel the first stage of the launcher, has just finished its qualification tests after two static firing campaigns that have been spread over…
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The drone has been integrated into the Mars 2020 mission rover – News of September 29, 2019 – With less than a year to go until the next launch window towards the planet Mars, the preparation for the March 2020 mission is progressing fast. As a reminder, this is a rover that largely incorporates the…
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More details on the strong activity of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* – News of September 29, 2019 – Sagittarius A*, the central black hole of the Milky Way, is usually quite calm, at least for a black hole of several million solar masses. It has been under regular surveillance for a quarter of…
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A new simulation suggests that Venus has had favorable conditions for life during a long time – News of September 24, 2019 – Venus, our closest neighbor, is often referred to as the twin sister of the Earth. Venus has a diameter and mass very close to those of our planet, but there is not…
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Water vapor detected on K2-18b, a habitable exoplanet ? – News of September 17, 2019 – Of the 4000 planets discovered outside the solar system, the vast majority are completely hostile to life. Whether they are too massive, too close or too far from their star, it is hard to imagine how liquid water and…
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Apogeios, the space city concept built with lunar materials – News of September 15, 2019 – Apogeios is a space city concept imagined by Olivier Boisard and Pierre Marx. Their approach is interesting in more than one way. Not only did they envision a functional architecture but they also thought about how their project could…
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Millions of solar sails to bring down the temperature on Earth ? – News of September 15, 2019 – Imagine that in a few decades or perhaps a hundred years, global warming makes the Earth almost unbearable. Humanity is unable to recapture all the carbon emitted during centuries of industrialization. We can then imagine that…
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ISRO has lost contact with the lander of the Chandrayaan-2 mission – News of September 10, 2019 – Last July, the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-2 took off for the Moon. It was taking with it a lander called Vikram and a little rover named Pragyan. After a travel of a few weeks to the orbit of…
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The commission of inquiry found the anomaly responsible for the Vega launcher incident – News of September 10, 2019 – On 11 July, an ESA’s Vega rocket was lost during the launch of a United Arab Emirates satellite. The commission of inquiry has now reached an official conclusion that allows us to shed light on…
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What SpaceX-related news are you looking for ? Starship Falcon Heavy Falcon 9 Crew Dragon Starlink Company SpaceX will devote many more launches to smallsats than previously announced – News of September 3, 2019 – SpaceX seems to want to refine its offer for smallsats. We now know more since the company’s website has been…
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The Skybot F-850 robot has arrived in the international space station – News of September 3, 2019 – Last Tuesday, after a few adventures, a Soyuz spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. Russia usually uses its Soyuz spaceships to take cosmonauts, while the Progress spaceships take care of the freighter. But in this Soyuz,…
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The SOFIA telescope plane observes space at 12 km altitude – News of September 1, 2019 – When astronomical observations are made, we have to deal with the Earth’s atmosphere, which disturbs the light and absorbs part of the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in the infrared. We can choose to overcome this by placing an observatory…
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AI SpaceFactory wins $500,000 thanks to its 3D printed martian home – News of September 1, 2019 – The works of AI SpaceFactory are very interesting concerning the 3D printing of buildings on the Martian surface. They were awarded a US $500,000 prize by the US Space Agency after creating a one-third scale Martian base…
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Focus on terraforming planets (Mars, Venus …) On August 15, 2019, Elon Musk tweeted a strange idea : atomize the planet Mars, not as an act of war but as an attempt at terraforming. According to the SpaceX leader, exploding nuclear bombs above the Martian polar ice caps would release large amounts of carbon dioxide…
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SN2016iet, a supernova like no other – News of August 27, 2019 – The core of the stars is the place of a perpetual struggle between the radiative pressure of the thermonuclear reactions that grow outwards and the gravity that seeks to bring everything back to the center of the star. The equilibrium point is…
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New dock on the International Space Station – News of August 27, 2019 – A Dragon cargo spaceship launched on July 25 has enabled the installation of a new dock on the international space station. It is here that the new American crewed spaceships, called the Crew Dragon and the CST-100 Starliner, can dock. There…
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Earth observation satellites help monitor the evolution of giant fires in the Amazon – News of August 24, 2019 – The Amazon rainforest is currently undergoing gigantic fires, generating unprecedented tensions over the climate and international relations. Smoke and fires from the Amazon rain forest in Brazil taken from space on August 20, 2019 French…
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Rocket Lab wants to create a reusable launcher – News of August 20, 2019 – Faced with the arrival of a competition at low cost, the players already installed are forced to innovate to maintain an advantage. Rocket Lab, which has been operating the Electron launcher for more thant two years, now wants to make…
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Arianespace places Ariane 6 in the smallsats market – News of August 20, 2019 – Arianespace announced the establishment of dedicated services to launch smallsats. The European company has thus dedicated a launch of Ariane 6 to small satellites in 2022. Ariane 6 must allow Arianespace to exist in a competitive space segment – News…
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iSpace reaches low orbit ! – News of August 20, 2019 – The smallsats market is booming. It attracts the greed of many private space companies on all continents. On July 25, iSpace became the first Chinese private company to reach orbit. Its Hyperbola-1 launcher successfully placed five small payloads in low orbit. A few…
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The LinkSpace demonstrator rises 300 meters above sea level – News of August 20, 2019 – The Chinese company LinkSpace made an impressive demonstration on August 9th. Its RLV-T5 demonstrator climbed 300 meters in the air before returning to land on its launch pad like SpaceX, with a margin of error of only 7 cm.…
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The tardigrades brought by Beresheet may have survived on the surface of the Moon – News of August 20, 2019 – Last April the Israeli lander Beresheet crashed on the surface of the Moon. The mission failed a short distance from the finish. SpaceIL, the company that built the lunar lander, now wants to project…
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The essentials about the sun Beside the sun, the planets and moons of the solar system seem insignificant. The sun accounts for 99.86% of the mass of the solar system. It consists mainly of hydrogen and helium that has been continuously fusing for 4.5 billion years. The size of the sun will change a lot.…
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The essential about Earth Earth is probably the jewel of the solar system. Endowed with incredible diversity, it is remarkable in many ways. Earth is the densest planet in the solar system. Some experts consider it a double planet. Earth is indeed the only rocky planet in the solar system to have a massive satellite.…
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In 1957, the USSR became the first nation to place an object in Earth orbit. But far from being satisfied with this feat, two years later the Soviet federation launched its first space probe to the Moon. Despite a high failure rate of its first space adventures, the ideological competition with the United States pushed…
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The Chinese space station Tiangong 2 burned in the atmosphere – News of July 23, 2019 – In April 2018, Tiangong 1, the first Chinese space station, went into the atmosphere in an uncontrolled way. Although largely burned, some small debris may have reached the ocean in the South Pacific. For China, Tiangong 1 was…
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Tiangong 3 is dependent on the resumption of launches of the rocket Long March 5 – News of July 23, 2019 – The Tiangong 2 space station has just been consumed in the Earth’s atmosphere, which was planned. For China, this marks the beginning of a period without a space station. Tiangong 1 and Tiangong…
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Blue Origin successfully tests the engine of the Blue Moon lunar lander – News of July 23, 2019 – Blue Origin is one of the companies that could manufacture the lunar lander of the Artemis program. For more than three years now, the company has been developing the Blue Moon lunar lander. Designed initially to…
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