Science

NASA and SpaceX have agreed to study the feasibility of awarding Elon Musk’s company a contract to boost the Hubble Space Telescope to a higher orbit, with a goal of extending its lifespan, the US space agency said Thursday. The renowned observatory has been operating since 1990 about 335 miles (540 kilometers) above Earth, in

Astronomers have assembled the largest-ever compilation of high-precision galaxy distances, called Cosmicflows-4. Galaxies, such as the Milky Way, are the building blocks of the universe, each comprised of up to several hundred billion stars. Galaxies beyond our immediate neighborhood are rushing away, faster if they are more distant, which is a consequence of the expansion

In a world first, NASA has crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to push the rocky traveler off its trajectory. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test – or DART – is meant to test one potential approach that could prevent an asteroid from colliding with Earth. David Barnhart is a professor of astronautics

It will be “difficult” for NASA to make a new attempt to launch its massive Moon rocket in October, an official from the US space agency said Tuesday, with a lift-off in November looking more likely.  The SLS rocket, the most powerful ever designed by NASA, had to be returned overnight to its storage hangar

Adani Group will invest $100 billion (roughly Rs. 8,14,200 crore) over the next decade, primarily in new energy and digital space that includes data centres, Chairman Gautam Adani said on Tuesday, as the group bets big on India growth story. As much as 70 percent of this investment will be in the energy transition space,

NASA’s mission to deflect asteroid is a step towards preparing the world for a potential future asteroid strike like the one which killed the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, the chances of which are very slim in our lifetime, Indian scientists said. In a first-of-its-kind mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft successfully

NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully slammed into a distant asteroid at hypersonic speed on Monday in the world’s first test of a planetary defense system, designed to prevent a potential doomsday meteorite collision with Earth. Humanity’s first attempt to alter the motion of an asteroid or any celestial body played out in a NASA webcast from

Ten months after launch, NASA’s asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft neared a planned impact with its target on Monday in a test of the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth. The cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to

India’s Mars orbiter craft has completed eight years in its orbit, well beyond its designed mission life of six months. Plans on a follow-on ‘Mangalyaan’ mission to the Red Planet, however, are yet to be firmed up. The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) – a technology demonstration venture – is the maiden interplanetary mission of the

The search for alien life just got more interesting as a team of scientists recently discovered new evidence suggesting that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has oceans that have all the basic requirements and materials needed for life to survive. According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers

If an earthquake strikes in the not too distant future and survivors are trapped under tonnes of rubble, the first responders to locate them could be swarms of cyborg cockroaches. That’s a potential application of a recent breakthrough by Japanese researchers who demonstrated the ability to mount “backpacks” of solar cells and electronics on the

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft is designed to be a one hit wonder. It will end its days by crashing into an asteroid at 24,000 kilometres per hour on September 26. Launched from Earth in November 2021, DART is about the size of a bus and was created to test and prove our

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has deployed his satellite-based Starlink service in Iran amid widespread protests in the country following which authorities had restricted internet access. This Iranian government had cut off internet access for many of its citizens on Wednesday amid widespread protests over the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody,

NASA’s historic uncrewed mission to the Moon is facing fresh difficulties. After technical problems derailed two launch attempts several weeks ago, a new liftoff of the Artemis 1 mission scheduled for Tuesday is now threatened by a storm gathering in the Caribbean. The storm, which has not yet been assigned a name, is currently located

NASA said Wednesday it had successfully trialed the fuelling process for its new rocket, after technical issues a few weeks ago halted two attempts to get the behemoth off the ground and headed towards the Moon. “All of the objectives that we set out to do we were able to accomplish today,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson,

Specks of dust retrieved by a Japanese space probe from an asteroid some 300 million kilometres from Earth have revealed a surprising component: a drop of water, scientists said Friday. The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space. The findings are in the latest research to

The European Space Agency announced a team of seven astronauts on Wednesday to train for NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon — but only one will have the chance to become the first European to walk on the lunar surface. The candidates — France’s Thomas Pesquet, Britain’s Tim Peake, Germany’s Alexander Gerst and Matthias Maurer, Italy’s

Astronomers said Thursday they have spotted a hot bubble of gas spinning clockwise around the black hole at the centre of our galaxy at “mind blowing” speeds. The detection of the bubble, which only survived for a few hours, is hoped to provide insight into how these invisible, insatiable, galactic monsters work. The supermassive black

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first image of Neptune, revealing the clearest view of the distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, NASA said. The most striking feature in the image is the crisp view of the planet’s rings — some of which have not been detected since NASA’s Voyager 2

A US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are set to blast off to the International Space Station Wednesday on a Russian-operated flight despite soaring tensions between Moscow and Washington over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. NASA’s Frank Rubio and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin are scheduled to take off from the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in

SpaceX will apply for an exemption from US sanctions against Iran in a bid to offer its satellite internet service to the country, owner Elon Musk said on Monday. “Starlink will apply for an exemption from sanctions against Iran,” Musk said in response to a tweet from a science reporter. Musk had initially announced that

Mars, by virtue of its tenuous atmosphere and proximity to our solar system’s asteroid belt, is far more vulnerable than Earth to being struck by space rocks – one of the many differences between the two planetary neighbours. Scientists are now gaining a fuller understanding of this Martian trait, with help from NASA’s robotic InSight

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, known for capturing some incredible images of the universe, has presented us with new pictures of our neighbouring planet, Mars. The telescope captured its first images and spectra of Mars on September 5. The James Webb Space Telescope, an international collaboration between NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian

A team of scientists has announced a surprising discovery – that they were able to create matter out of nothing. The experiment was carried out in January 2022, in which strong electric fields were created in a simple laboratory leveraging the unique properties of grapheme, which enabled the creation of particle-antiparticle pair from nothing at

American space agency NASA has updated its Eyes on the Solar System website, which allows space enthusiasts to explore the “universe beyond and the spacecraft exploring them”. Visitors can explore the planets, their moons, asteroids, comets and the spacecraft from 1950 to 2050. The website also allows them to simulate the landing of NASA’s spacecraft,

India’s first human space-flight mission, Gaganyaan, is expected to launch in 2024, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said recently. The government had planned the space flight for 2021, but the schedule got delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first test-flight will be followed by a female-looking spacefaring humanoid robot. The Indian Air Force (IAF) has

Blue Origin rocket has failed mid-flight, a day after its lift-off. This has caused the rocket to abort its cargo capsule to safety before crashing into the Texas desert. The rocket aimed to send NASA-funded experiments and other payloads to the edge of the space. The booster crashed within the designated hazard area. The rocket

NASA has completed important repairs on its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the US space agency recently announced. The leaking fuel seals on the SLS were replaced by engineers last week. One of the fuel lines to the SLS started leaking earlier this month forcing the space agency to halt its attempt to launch Artemis

NASA is reportedly considering a third attempt at launching its Artemis I Moon rocket on September 23, according to a senior official. The US space agency could launch the Artemis I SLS-Orion spacecraft on either September 23 or on September 27. The new dates were revealed days after NASA halted the launch of the rocket for the second

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured in-depth details of a stellar nursery nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula. Webb’s recent image of the 30 Doradus, or Taratula Nebula, displays several never-before-seen young, with galaxies in background. The picture also reveals the composition of the nebula’s gas and dust. Located around 161,000 light-years away from us, Tarantula has