The United Kingdom’s space conference held every two years was a more muted affair this year – pun intended – as it has been forced online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless there were some significant announcements to be had. While the...
Some years ago this column started its annual analysis called “The Great Space Race”. The idea was that while the original “Moon race” ended in 1969 when the USA beat the Soviet Union onto the lunar surface with its Apollo 11 human landing, a new one has...
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is back online after a month of downtime due to a malfunctioning payload computer. The veteran telescope, launched to low Earth orbit in 1990, was brought back into service on 17 July when controllers switched over to a backup...
ESA decided the winner of its fifth “Medium-class” Cosmic Vision competition on 10 June. Out of the two finalists the Venus-oriented “EnVision” orbiter won out over the gamma-ray burst studying “THESEUS”. The initial call for...
NASA selected two new missions to form part of its Discovery programme on 2 June. These missions lie on the smaller end of the scale for NASA, but will still be funded to the tune of US$500 million each. The winning candidates have been in competition since 2019 when...
Ingenuity – part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission – made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet at 0730 GMT on 19 April. The 2 kg solar-powered drone helicopter, which had been deployed on the Martian surface by the Mars rover Perseverence, managed to...
