Space news

A Brazilian government agency will launch an Earth observation satellite on a Vega C rocket, working with a launch broker rather than contracting directly with Avio. The post Vega C to launch Brazilian satellite appeared first on SpaceNews.

Airbus has tapped Avio to launch its first Pléiades Neo Next Earth observation satellite aboard a Vega C rocket. The mission is expected to launch in early 2028. The Airbus Defence and Space-operated Pléiades Neo Next programme is the successor to the Pléiades Neo constellation, which provides very high-resolution optical Earth observation data to governmental […] The post Airbus Selects Vega C to Launch First Pléiades Neo Next Satellite appeared first on European Spaceflight.

The company makes phased-array ground stations that connect with satellites across multiple orbits The post Northwood Space raises $100 million Series B, lands $49 million Space Force deal appeared first on SpaceNews.

Oman signed the Artemis Accords for responsible space exploration Jan. 26, becoming the 61st nation to do so. The post Oman signs Artemis Accords appeared first on SpaceNews.

The first two images from the Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder satellite have been shared at the European Space Conference in Brussels, showing how the mission will provide data on temperature and humidity, for more accurate weather forecasting over Europe and northern Africa.

Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has awarded a contract to SpaceLaunch for the launch of its Amazonia-1B Earth observation satellite aboard a Vega C rocket in 2027. In September 2025, Italian rocket builder Avio announced that it had signed a launch services agreement with US-based launch aggregator SpaceLaunch to carry an Earth observation […] The post Brazil’s Amazonia-1B Satellite to Be Launched Aboard Vega C appeared first on European Spaceflight.

Weeks of intense rain overwhelmed rivers and reservoirs, displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

NASA said this evening that the Wet Dress Rehearsal or WDR in advance of the launch of Artemis II is now planned for “as early as” Saturday, January 31. The […]

SAN FRANCISCO – NASA’s Earth Science Division is exploring partnerships with external organizations to support instrument mounted on the International Space Station and free-flyer missions. “For some of these missions […] The post NASA seeks partners for Earth Science extended missions appeared first on SpaceNews.

The last week of January has a busy slate of orbital launches, with flights from… The post Launch Roundup: GPS, Starlink, Electron launches scheduled for last week of January appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.

South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Systems is partnering with Canada’s MDA Space to explore collaboration on the development of a defense satellite constellation for the Asian nation. The post Hanwha exploring South Korean defense constellation with MDA Space and Telesat appeared first on SpaceNews.

To an untrained eye, the aircraft engine sitting outside of a Cincinnati facility in December might have looked like standard hardware. But NASA and GE Aerospace researchers watching the unit fire up for a demonstration knew what they were looking at: a hybrid engine performing at a level that could potentially power an airliner.   It’s something new in the […]

The Sultanate of Oman signed the Artemis Accords during a ceremony in Muscat attended by NASA on Monday, becoming the 61st nation to commit to responsible space exploration for the benefit of all humanity. “Oman’s accession to the Artemis Accords sets an important example about the value of responsible behavior and shared pursuit of discovery,” […]

Space physics and cardiac research kicked off the week aboard the International Space Station for the three-person Expedition 74 crew. The orbital residents explored storing cryogenic fluids in space and how their cardiovascular system is adapting to weightlessness.

As NASA fosters technologies needed to live and work farther away from home than ever before, the agency’s Technology Transfer program has the sole mission of getting those innovations into the hands of companies, entrepreneurs, and, ultimately, everyday people. The agency’s Spinoff publication has captured this endeavor for half a century, sharing stories of space […]

Space-based technology could help track plastic and other flotsam by its ‘fingerprints.’ In late 2025, scientists reported that, for the first time, they were able to detect concentrations of plastic pollution on land using NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) sensor aboard the International Space Station. The technology has inspired marine researchers to […]

Oman-based industrial conglomerate MB Group has ordered a small geostationary broadband satellite from Astranis that is slated to launch this summer. The post Astranis adds Oman customer to summer GEO launch lineup appeared first on SpaceNews.

While this eerie NASA Hubble Space Telescope image may look ghostly, it’s actually full of new life. Lupus 3 is a star-forming cloud about 500 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.  White wisps of gas swirl throughout the region, and in the lower-left corner resides a dark dust cloud. Bright T Tauri stars shine at the left, […]

With the Webb telescope’s unprecedented sensitivity, scientists are learning more about dark matter’s influence on stars, galaxies, and even planets like Earth. Scientists using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have made one of the most detailed, high-resolution maps of dark matter ever produced. It shows how the invisible, ghostly material overlaps and intertwines […]

You may not see it with the naked eye, but in Earth’s orbit, a silent crisis is unfolding. With over 11,000 active satellites currently in orbit — a number expected to reach between 30,000 and 60,000 by 2030 — 40,500 tracked objects of 10 cm and more, 1.1 million pieces of space debris between 1 […] The post We need a ‘Planetary Neural Network’ for AI-enabled space infrastructure protection appeared first on SpaceNews.

The European Space Agency’s innovative Biomass satellite is now fully commissioned, opening free access to a powerful new stream of data that promise a step change in our understanding of forest dynamics and their role in regulating the global carbon cycle.

Last autumn, the European Space Agency’s Orbital Robotics Laboratory hosted three student teams from universities across Europe. After being selected to join the ESA Academy Experiments programme, the students were invited to carry out the experimental part of their research projects in the agency’s test facilities with support and guidance from experts.

An H3 launch failure in December may have been caused by an unusual event that led to the satellite separating from the rocket prematurely. The post H3 failure linked to payload fairing separation anomaly appeared first on SpaceNews.

On 17 January, the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft were rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to Launch Pad 39B. The 6.5-km journey took around 12 hours and was carried out using NASA's crawler-transporter, which has been moving rockets to launch pads for over 50 years.

College Station, TX (SPX) Jan 21, 2026 A hundred years ago, quantum mechanics was a radical theory that baffled even the brightest minds. Today, it's the backbone of technologies that shape our lives, from lasers and microchips to quantum computers and secure communications. In a sweeping new perspective published in Science, Dr. Marlan Scully, a university distinguished professor at Texas A and M University, traces the journey

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 21, 2026 A new theoretical framework from physicists at Heidelberg University connects two long standing views of how a single exotic particle behaves inside a quantum many body system of fermions. The work unifies descriptions of an impurity that moves through a Fermi sea and an impurity that is so heavy it is effectively fixed in place. In the standard quasiparticle picture, a lone electron or at

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jan 20, 2026 Electronic order in quantum materials often arises through intricate, non-uniform patterns that shift across space. A well-known example is the charge density wave (CDW), an ordered electronic state that forms periodic patterns at low temperatures. Although CDWs have been studied for decades, directly observing how their strength and spatial coherence evolve through a phase transition has remain

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 26, 2026 Starfighters Space Inc has completed a dedicated wind tunnel campaign for its STARLAUNCH 1 air launched rocket, marking a key technical milestone in the development of the sub orbital vehicle. The program focused on validating how the rocket separates from the companys supersonic aircraft platform under a range of flight conditions. The test series examined STARLAUNCH 1 separation behavior

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jan 26, 2026 Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with colleagues at the Centro de Astrobiologia in Spain, have identified the largest sulfur-bearing molecule yet seen in interstellar space. The compound, 2,5-cyclohexadiene-1-thione (C6H6S), was detected in the molecular cloud G+0.693-0.027 near the center of the Milky Way, about 27,000 light years from Earth. With a

Paris, France (SPX) Jan 26, 2026 Just as avalanches on snowy mountains begin with the motion of a small amount of snow, Solar Orbiter has revealed that a powerful solar flare can start from initially weak magnetic disturbances that rapidly escalate into a large-scale eruption. During a close approach to the Sun on 30 September 2024, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft captured one of its most detailed views yet of a larg

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 26, 2026 Space debris, the thousands of fragments of human made hardware abandoned in Earth orbit, can threaten people and infrastructure when it falls out of the sky and reaches the ground. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London have now shown that existing networks of earthquake detecting seismometers can also detect and track falling space junk in near real time, offering

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 26, 2026 Sweeping winds of vaporized metals have been detected in a massive cloud of gas and dust that dimmed the light of a distant star for nearly nine months, offering a rare view of late stage planetary system evolution. Astronomers obtained the observations with the Gemini South telescope in Chile, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, which is partly funded by the U.S. National Science

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jan 26, 2026 Modern cells rely on intricate molecular machinery and genetic programs to grow and divide, but the earliest protocells were likely simple lipid-bound compartments whose behavior depended mainly on their physical and chemical properties. A new experimental study suggests that subtle differences in membrane composition could have helped these primitive compartments grow, fuse, and hold on to gene

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jan 26, 2026 China is preparing to bring into operation its first offshore platform purpose built for testing, launching and recovering reusable liquid propellant rockets, with the goal of lowering access costs to orbit and expanding commercial launch capacity. The new facility is located at the Oriental Aerospace Port in Haiyang in east China s Shandong province, currently the country s only dedicated

This will be the third launch of a GPS satellite in as many years. Liftoff of the GPS 3-9 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is scheduled for 11:42 p.m. EST (0442 UTC).

Here is SpacePolicyOnline.com’s list of space policy events for the week of January 25-31, 2026 and any insight we can offer about them. The Senate is in session this week. […]

Gen. Michael Guetlein says deterrence hinges less on exquisite technology than on cost, production scale and industrial execution The post Golden Dome is forcing the Pentagon to confront missile defense economics appeared first on SpaceNews.

The Starlink 17-20 mission will be the seventh Starlink mission this year. Liftoff from pad 4E is scheduled for 7:38:20 a.m. PST (10:38:20 a.m. EST / 1538:20 UTC).

NASA and the Department of Energy have agreed to work together on development of nuclear reactors for the moon as industry awaits the release of a final call for proposals. The post NASA and DOE to collaborate on lunar nuclear reactor development appeared first on SpaceNews.

German rocket builder Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) has been awarded launch service contracts for two missions under the Flight Ticket Initiative. The Flight Ticket Initiative is a programme run jointly by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Union that provides subsidised launch opportunities for European companies and organisations on small launch vehicles. Under […] The post RFA Awarded ESA Flight Ticket Initiative Launch Contracts appeared first on European Spaceflight.

Rocket Lab’s innovative “Hungry Hippo” fairings for the Neutron rocket have arrived at Wallops Island,… The post Hungry Hippos and Test Tanks – Rocket Lab building towards Neutron appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.

NASA and its partners will discuss the upcoming crew rotation to the International Space Station during a pair of news conferences on Friday, Jan. 30, from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. At 11 a.m. EST, mission leadership will discuss final launch and mission preparations in a news conference that will stream on the […]

NASA has selected ADNET Systems, Inc. of Bethesda, Maryland, to provide global modeling and data assimilation support at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The Global Modeling and Assimilation Support contract is a single-award, cost-plus-fixed-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a maximum ordering value of approximately $84 million with a five-year period of performance […]

NASA has selected 34 global volunteers to track the Orion spacecraft during the crewed Artemis II mission’s journey around the Moon. The Artemis II test flight will launch NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, carrying the Orion spacecraft and a crew of four astronauts, on a mission into deep space. The agency’s second mission in […]

Cardiac research and artificial intelligence were the main science topics for the Expedition 74 crew on Friday. The International Space Station also received an orbital boost when the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft fired its engines at the end of the week.

Listen to this audio excerpt from Dustin Gohmert, Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS) manager: During NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon, the astronauts inside the Orion spacecraft will be wearing specialized pressure suits designed to protect them throughout their journey. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Dustin Gohmert leads the team responsible for […]

A green and red aurora streams across Earth’s horizon above the city lights of Europe in this Jan. 19, 2026, photograph, which looks north across Italy toward Germany. The International Space Station was orbiting 262 miles above the Mediterranean Sea at approximately 10:02 p.m. local time when the image was captured. Also known as the […]

A new NASA study of its Apollo lunar soils clarifies the Moon’s record of meteorite impacts and timing of water delivery. These findings place upper bounds on how much water meteorites could have supplied later in Earth’s history. Research has previously shown that meteorites may have been a significant source of Earth’s water as they […]

Like a recording artist who has had a long career, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has a “back catalog” of cosmic recordings that is impossible to replicate. To access these X-ray tracks, or observations, the ultimate compendium has been developed: the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC). The CSC contains the X-ray data detected up to the end of 2020 by Chandra, the world’s […]

Florida-based Space Beyond plans to start building its first memorial spacecraft next week after booking a launch on SpaceX’s October 2027 rideshare mission. The post Space Beyond lines up 2027 SpaceX launch for low-cost memorial cubesat appeared first on SpaceNews.