The Israeli privately-financed SpaceIL Beresheet (B’reshit) unmanned lunar landing probe has crashed on the Moon following a complication that caused its landing engine to be cut off at a key moment. Having hitched a paid-for ride on a Falcon 9 launch on 22 February,...
French space and geophysics expert, Professor Avril Fou, has warned that the Earth’s rotation rate is slowing down, with long term implications for the seasons* and the weather. “To ignore this slow down would be foolish,” Avril Fou warns. So can...
NASA has selected the SPHEREx astronomy mission to progress to operational status as a NASA Medium-class Explorer (MIDEX) type mission. SPHEREx – Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization and Ices Explorer – will conduct...
The construction of the FLEX – the Fluorescence Explorer spacecraft which is to study “vegetation fluorescence” to determine global photosynthetic activity – has been officially ordered. Having been originally selected in Novemer 2015 as the...
While it might be more than two years past its “use-by” date – i.e. its five-year minimum design life – Russia has keenly felt the loss of its in-orbit radio astronomy telescope, Spektr-R (Radioastron). The spacecraft, built by NPO Lavotchkin to detect gamma and X-ray...
The world was congratulating NASA after its New Horizons spacecraft successfully passed space object Ultima Thule on 1 January some four billion miles from Earth. The spacecraft then began slowly relaying images of the body located in the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto,...
