Science

NASA is considering a second firing of its Moon rocket engines after a critical test came up short over the weekend, a move that could bump the first flight in the Artemis lunar-landing programme into next year. The space agency had aimed to launch its new Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket and an empty

Lunar rocks retrieved by a historic Chinese mission to the Moon weighed less than initially targeted, but China is still willing to study the samples with foreign scientists, the mission’s spokesman said on Monday. China became the third country ever to secure lunar samples when its unmanned Chang’e-5 probe, named after the mythical Moon goddess,

Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit reached space for the first time on Sunday with a successful test of its air-launched rocket, delivering ten NASA satellites to orbit and achieving a key milestone after aborting the rocket’s first test launch last year. The Long Beach, California-based company’s LauncherOne rocket was dropped mid-air from the underside of

NASA’s deep space exploration rocket built by Boeing briefly ignited all four engines of its behemoth core stage for the first time on Saturday, cutting short a crucial test to advance a years-delayed US government programme to return humans to the moon in the next few years. Mounted in a test facility at NASA’s Stennis

NASA declared the Mars digger dead Thursday after failing to burrow deep into the red planet to take its temperature. Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to drill into the Martian crust. But the 16-inch-long (40-centimetre) device that is part of NASA’s InSight lander couldn’t gain

Billionaire Jeff Bezos-owned space company Blue Origin aims to carry the first passengers on its New Shepard space vehicle as early as April, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Blue Origin completed the fourteenth test flight of its New Shepard rocket booster and capsule on Thursday, marking one of the last

Inspired by how schools of fish intuitively synchronise their movements, Harvard scientists have engineered miniature underwater robots capable of forming autonomous swarms. Each robotic fish, known as a Bluebot, is equipped with cameras and blue LED lights that sense the direction and distance of others inside water tanks. They swim using flapping fins rather than

Malaysian researchers have developed a method to transform the fibre found in normally discarded pineapple leaves to make a strong material that can be used to build the frames for unmanned aircraft, or drones. The project, headed by Professor Mohamed Thariq Hameed Sultan at Malaysia’s Putra University, has been trying to find sustainable uses for

OpenAI has unveiled DALL-E and CLIP, two new generative AI models that can generate images from your text and classify your images into categories respectively. DALL·E is a neural network that can generate images from the wildest text and image descriptions fed to it, such as “as an armchair in the shape of an avocado”,

A new breakthrough could help reduced the carbon footprint of air travel, with the aim to bring emissions by jets to net zero. A team of researchers from Oxford University has successfully managed to turn carbon dioxide (CO2) into jet fuel, though as of now the experiment was performed at a very small scale. As

In an article in Cell, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers described how they used advanced genetic engineering techniques to transform a bacterial protein into a new research tool that may help monitor serotonin transmission with greater fidelity than current methods. Preclinical experiments, primarily in mice, showed that the sensor could detect subtle, real-time changes in

The Indian Space Research Organisation on Thursday said it has released the first set of data from the country”s second mission to the Moon, the Chandrayaan-2, for the general public. Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22, 2019 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. The Orbiter which was injected into a

A new Chinese carrier rocket made its first flight on Tuesday under a long-term plan to develop reusable launch vehicles aimed at reducing mission costs and speed up launch schedules for commercial clients. The medium-lift Long March 8 Y-1 blasted off at 12:37pm (10:07am IST) from the southern Chinese island of Hainan carrying five satellites,

Winter Solstice this year will see a rare astronomical event – the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. True to the saying that ‘every cloud has a silver lining,’ the pandemic-ridden 2020 is bringing a year-end treat for all of us. Google is also celebrating the Winter Solstice and the Great Conjunction with its latest

An unmanned Chinese spacecraft carrying rocks and soil from the Moon returned safely to Earth early Thursday in the first mission in four decades to collect lunar samples, the Xinhua news agency said. The return module of the space probe known as Chang’e-5 landed in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region, Xinhua said, quoting the China

A Canadian astronaut will take part in a lunar mission for the first time in 2023, as part of the NASA-led Artemis project, the minister for innovation, science and industry announced Wednesday. “I am proud to announce another first: Canada will join the US on the first crewed mission to the Moon since the Apollo