Science

Elon Musk’s SpaceX made final preparations early on Monday to launch its powerful new Starship rocket system to space for the first time, on a brief but highly anticipated uncrewed test flight from the Gulf Coast of Texas. The two-stage rocketship, standing taller than the Statue of Liberty at 394 feet (120 m) high, was

Two astronauts from Saudi Arabia, including the first Saudi woman, will blast off from Florida on May 8 on a private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), Axiom Space and NASA officials said Thursday. Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, will become the first Saudi woman to voyage into space and will be joined

A supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a 2,00,000-light-year-long condensed trail of newborn stars, twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy, in its wake, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US. Captured accidentally by NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, the black hole was seen racing

A key SpaceX Starship Super Heavy rocket launch test could happen next week, according to a planning notice posted Tuesday by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA notice said the launch’s primary expected date is April 10, but listed backup dates as April 11 and 12. Billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket and satellite company

High school students and their tutors in Cyprus have developed a prototype robot powered with ChatGPT artificial intelligence technology to harness and improve teaching experiences in the classroom. Named AInstein, the squat robot created by three Pascal Schools in Cyprus stands roughly the size of a small adult and looks like a sculpted version of

Virgin Orbit, the satellite launch company founded by Richard Branson, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will sell the business, the firm said in a statement Tuesday. The California-based company said last week it was laying off 85 percent of its employees — around 675 people — to reduce expenses due to its inability

NASA unveiled the crew on Monday for its first human mission to the Moon in more than 50 years –- including the first woman and Black man to voyage into deep space. Christina Koch, a NASA astronaut who holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, will be a mission specialist on

NASA plans on Monday to introduce the four astronauts for its Artemis II lunar flyby mission, set for launch as early as next year in what would be the first crewed voyage around the Moon since the end of the Apollo era more than 50 years ago. Officials from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), which

Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman Sreedhara Panicker Somanath on Sunday congratulated Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) project management team for successfully conducting the reusable launch vehicle (RLV) autonomous landing mission (RLV-LEX) at the Aeronautical Test Range (ATR) in Karnataka’s Chitradurga. ISRO’s chairman said that for the first time in the world, with the help of

Amit Kshatriya, a decorated Indian-American software and robotics engineer was appointed as the first head of NASA’s newly-established Moon to Mars Programme that will help the agency ensure a long-term lunar presence needed to prepare for humanity’s next giant leap to the Red Planet. Kshatriya will serve as NASA’s first head of the office, with

Elon Musk‘s brain implant company Neuralink has approached one of the biggest US neurosurgery centers as a potential clinical trials partner as it prepares to test its devices on humans once regulators allow for it, according to six people familiar with the matter. Neuralink has been developing brain implants since 2016 it hopes will eventually be

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, on Friday denied a media report from earlier this week that said investors from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were planning to invest in a multi-billion dollar funding round in the company. A unit of Saudi Arabia’s investment fund and an Abu Dhabi-based company are planning

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) are working on designing antennas that can empower 6G technology, which is instrumental in realising efficient V2X (Vehicle to Everything) communications. In a recent study, the team, led by Debdeep Sarkar, Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, shows how self-interference in full-duplex communication antennas

Two organic compounds essential for living organisms have been found in samples retrieved from the asteroid Ryugu, buttressing the notion that some ingredients crucial for the advent of life arrived on Earth aboard rocks from space billions of years ago. Scientists said on Tuesday they detected uracil and niacin in rocks obtained by the Japanese

Since time immemorial, humans around the world have gazed up in wonder at the night sky. The starry night sky has not only inspired countless works of music, art, and poetry but has also played an important role in timekeeping, navigation and agricultural practices in many traditions. For many cultures, the night sky, with its

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the first-ever image of a black hole, stunning the world. Now, scientists are taking it further. The next generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) collaboration aims to create high-quality videos of black holes. But this next-generation collaboration is groundbreaking in other ways, too. It’s the first large

The US Air Force on Wednesday handed over NISAR, an earth observation satellite jointly developed by NASA and ISRO, to the Indian space agency. A US Air Force C-17 aircraft carrying the NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar (NISAR) has landed in Bengaluru, the US Consulate in Chennai said. The satellite is an outcome of a collaboration

NASA is on track to launch a crewed mission around the Moon in November of next year after a successful unmanned test flight, the US space agency said Tuesday. NASA officials provided an update on the Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time since the historic Apollo missions

The Indian Space Research Organisation said it successfully carried out an “extremely challenging” controlled re-entry experiment of the decommissioned orbiting Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT-1) satellite. “The satellite re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and would have disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean”, the Bengaluru-headquartered national space agency said on Twitter on Tuesday. The final impact region estimated is in the

National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of photos of asteroid Dimorphos when it was deliberately hit by a 1,200-pound NASA spacecraft called DART on September 26, 2022, according to their statement. Hubble‘s time-lapse movie of the aftermath of DART’s collision reveals surprising and remarkable, hour-by-hour changes as dust and

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched a four-person crew on a trip to the International Space Station early on Thursday, with a Russian cosmonaut and United Arab Emirates astronaut joining two NASA crewmates on the flight. The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called

Observations by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are upending the understanding of the early universe, indicating the presence of large and mature but remarkably compact galaxies teeming with stars far sooner than scientists had considered possible. Astronomers said data obtained by the telescope reveals what appear to be six big galaxies as mature as our

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday proposed a $175,000 (nearly Rs. 1.45 crore) civil penalty against SpaceX for failing to submit some safety data to the agency prior to an August 2022 launch of Starlink satellites. The FAA said SpaceX was required to submit the information, known as launch collision analysis trajectory data, directly

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle — SSLV-D2 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota on Friday. The launch has put ISRO’s earth observation satellite EOS-07 and two co-passenger satellites Janus-1 and AzaadiSAT-2 into a 450 km circular orbit around the Earth. According to ISRO, the second developmental flight of

The US Department of Transportation said on Thursday it is investigating Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink over the potentially illegal movement of hazardous pathogens. A Department of Transportation spokesperson told Reuters about the probe after the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal-welfare advocacy group, wrote to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg earlier on Thursday

SpaceX plans to fire up all 33 engines powering its massive Starship launch system ahead of its first orbital launch, a key milestone in the company’s efforts to reach the moon and Mars. The so-called static fire is scheduled for Thursday, Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president and chief operating officer, said Wednesday at an industry

Samsung Semiconductor India Research (SSIR) announced a new partnership with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to promote research and development in the field of on-chip Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) protection. The partnership seeks to build cutting-edge ESD device solutions to protect ultra-high-speed serial interfaces in advanced Integrated Circuits (ICs) and system-on-chip (SoC) products, a joint

There are hundreds of millions of asteroids in our solar system, which means new asteroids are discovered quite frequently. It also means close encounters between asteroids and Earth are fairly common. Some of these close encounters end up with the asteroid impacting Earth, occasionally with severe consequences. A recently discovered asteroid, named 2023 BU, has

Google is reportedly working on the ability to set up an Android phone via the company’s Fast Pair feature. The capability could reportedly debut on a smartphone with the Samsung Galaxy S23 series that is expected to be unveiled by the South Korean conglomerate at its Galaxy Unpacked 2023 event on February 1. The upcoming

Boston Dynamics has unveiled the latest version of its Atlas Robot that is capable of improved human-like movement and actions. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based robot firm, showed off the humanoid robot with grippers while displaying its capabilities via a video posted to YouTube. The robot is seen performing complex actions such as grabbing and throwing an

Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way’s outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy — almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy. The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way‘s halo, a spherical stellar cloud

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Microsoft on Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to fuel the growth of space technology start-ups in India. The MoU seeks to empower space tech start-ups across the country with technology tools and platforms, go-to-market support and mentoring to help them scale and become enterprise-ready. This collaboration has

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is raising $750 million (roughly Rs. 6,200 crore) in a new round of funding that values the rocket and satellite company at $137 billion (roughly Rs. 11,33,800 crore) from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, CNBC reported late Monday. Reuters had reported in November that SpaceX was in talks about an offering of mostly