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SpaceX’s IPO moonshot draws some doubters on Wall Street

Elon Musk wants to take SpaceX public—and he’s asking investors to believe the rocket and AI company is worth almost $1.75 trillion.

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AtLAST, a telescope that could reveal the missing half of the universe

A new European-led telescope could map the dusty, hidden half of the universe, all without using fossil fuels. If you have ever seen the Milky Way in the night sky, you probably noticed that it looks cloudy. That is because towards the center of our galaxy, and of most galaxies, there are vast amounts of […]

New form of NAND flash data storage for deep space missions can survive 1 million rads

As space missions travel farther from Earth, spacecraft must increasingly be able to process and store their own data. Soon, artificial intelligence (AI) could be the primary tool for handling this growing volume of information.

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Innovative Mars rovers ‘swim’ through the sand

Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally “swim” through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators.

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German firms join forces on space surveillance system

German defense tech start-up Helsing and space technology group OHB on Tuesday unveiled a joint venture to develop an AI-powered surveillance and targeting system for use in outer space.

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MeerKAT discovers 15 new millisecond pulsars in a well known globular cluster

Using the MeerKAT radio telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered 15 new millisecond pulsars in 47 Tucanae—one of the closest and best studied globular clusters. The finding is reported in the latest issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Indigenous Australians were the world’s first astronomers. But their knowledge is now at risk

I’m a proud Yorta Yorta and Barapa Barapa man, an Indigenous astronomer and a trainee ecologist. When I look at the night sky, I don’t just see stars. Instead, I see an ancient knowledge system that has guided people, culture and Country for tens of thousands of years.

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Asteroid 2022 OB5 spins too fast for current prospectors, highlighting the divide between ‘accessible’ and ‘exploitable’

Asteroid mining seems simple in theory. A spacecraft flies up to a giant rock in space, scoops out some material, and either processes it on site or returns it back to a huge central processing facility. But in practice, it is certainly not that simple, and a new paper from some Spanish researchers, published in […]

Consistency check casts doubt on evolving dark energy

Cosmologists have long struggled to determine whether the universe’s accelerating expansion is being driven by a simple cosmological constant, or whether dark energy’s influence is evolving over time. In a new analysis published in Physical Review D, Samsuzzaman Afroz and Suvodip Mukherjee at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, have identified a subtle impact […]

SMILE spacecraft launches to capture first X-ray views of Earth’s magnetic shield

A joint European-Chinese spacecraft blasted off into orbit Tuesday to investigate what happens when extreme winds and giant explosions of plasma shot out from the sun slam into Earth’s magnetic shield.

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Video: Preparing Smile for space

Before Smile can begin studying how Earth responds to the streams of particles and bursts of radiation from the sun, the spacecraft had to complete an extraordinary journey here on Earth.

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Mars reveals first Zwan-Wolf effect deep in its atmosphere during a solar storm

In December 2023, scientists looking at Mars data stumbled across something completely unexpected—observations of an atmospheric effect never before seen in the Red Planet’s atmosphere. Using instruments aboard NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission, scientists identified a phenomenon known to occur in Earth’s magnetosphere, where charged particles are squeezed like toothpaste coming out […]

New research examines how misinformation threatens planetary defense and public trust

As misinformation spreads faster than ever across digital platforms, new research highlights growing risks to public understanding of planetary defense, an area of science that deals with the threat from asteroid and comet impacts, with potentially global consequences.

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Bizarre Venus surface formations puzzle planetary scientists

Bizarre Venus surface formations (or coronae) are likely key to understanding our twin planet’s heretofore inscrutable interior. Using NASA Magellan spacecraft data from decades past, Anna Gulcher, an Earth and planetary scientist at Germany’s University of Freiburg, has created innovative new 3D models of the largest coronae to better understand Venus’ puzzling geodynamics.

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Hubble reveals rare galaxy 100 million light-years away caught in transition

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an enigmatic galaxy with a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no obvious spiral arms. Reddish-brown clumps and filaments of dust partially obscure the galaxy’s full face, while red, blue, and orange light from distant galaxies shines through its diffuse outer […]