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Edna Johnson, Kyiv (2025)

10/10/2023

Jeff Bezos, the founder of the online retail giant Amazon, is expanding his interests in space.

On Friday he launched two prototype satellites for a broadband mega-constellation he calls Project Kuiper.

Mr Bezos is planning to put up more than 3,200 spacecraft in the next few years to deliver internet connections to anywhere on the globe.

He hopes to challenge Elon Musk's Starlink, which already offers satellite internet in many countries.

The two small satellites launching on Friday - KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 - will trial the necessary technology.

They were carried into a 500km-high (310 miles) orbit by an Atlas-5 rocket.

The flight from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida launched at 14:00 EDT (18:00 GMT).

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Amazon began research and development on the $10bn (£8bn) Project Kuiper in 2018.

The ambition is to join the rapidly growing market for high-bandwidth, low latency (minimal delay) internet connections that are bounced across the sky, as opposed to through fibre connections on the ground.

Elon Musk's SpaceX company is the leader in the field and already has more than 4,800 working spacecraft in orbit.

UK-based Eutelsat-OneWeb has also built out a network of 620 satellites, but the list of wannabes in the sector is growing all the time with similar projects announced in Canada, the EU, and China, in addition to proposals from other US companies.

22/09/2023

The US space agency Nasa has named the four astronauts who will take humanity back to the Moon, after a 50-year gap.

Christina Koch will become the first woman astronaut ever assigned to a lunar mission, while Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut on one.

They will join Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen to fly a capsule around the Moon late next year or early in 2025.

The astronauts won't land on the Moon, but their mission will pave the way for a touchdown by a subsequent crew.

08/09/2023

Now, the newly named astronauts will climb into Orion for Artemis-2 and a journey to and from the Moon that's likely to take about 10 days.

The last human spaceflight mission to the Moon was Apollo 17 in December 1972. The first landing was Apollo 11 in 1969.

Artemis-3, the first landing of the new era, is not expected to occur until at least 12 months after Artemis-2.

Nasa doesn't yet have a system capable of taking astronauts down to the lunar surface. This is being developed by entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX company.

It will be a variant of his Starship vehicle, which is due to start flight testing in the next few weeks.

06/09/2023

ohn's used to pushing himself to the limit. After losing his leg and learning to walk again with a prosthesis, he took up running - for fun at first, then competitively. He went on to win a bronze medal in the 100m at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics.

He then decided to become a doctor and is currently working as a trauma and orthopaedic registrar in Hampshire, but he's had to pause his medical career - the opportunity to work with Esa was too good to turn down.

"I'm very much following my heart and I'm following my curiosity," he explains, "and I'm following my passion for science and life."

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I've joined John on board a specially adapted aircraft to take a parabolic flight. As the plane flies steeply upwards, we experience extra gravity - about twice as much as usual - where your whole body is pressed down into the floor.

Then, as the plane gets ready to nosedive back down, there's a moment when we become weightless for about 20 seconds. It's not that gravity has vanished, we're still bound by the laws of physics. Instead, we're actually in freefall - as is the plane around us - but this reproduces zero-gravity conditions. The plane repeats this manoeuvre again and again.

01/09/2023

John McFall is the European Space Agency's first ever para-astronaut, selected to study how feasible it is for someone with a physical disability to live and work in space. BBC News joined him on board a parabolic flight, where he experienced weightlessness for the first time.

One minute John McFall is lying on the floor of a plane. The next, he starts to float upwards, still horizontal, seemingly levitating towards the ceiling.

He looks astonished - everyone on this far-from-normal flight does, as they slowly rise into the air. The sensation of being weightless, no longer pinned down by gravity, is extraordinary.

You feel totally out of control - because you are. Any tiny movement against something solid sends you catapulting around the cabin, bouncing into walls and people. It's like being in a slow-motion pinball machine.

A smile begins to form across John's face - he starts laughing. "It's brilliant, it's amazing," he says.

Then suddenly, the weightlessness is gone and he falls to the ground.

29/08/2023

Anglesey, north Wales, has some of the darkest skies in Europe.

Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island), off the Llŷn Peninsula, has become the first site in Europe to be awarded International Dark Sky Sanctuary certification.

Speaking from Anglesey, Dani Robertson, the dark skies officer for North Wales, said the evening had been a visual treat despite a light cloudy haze.

"I'm in my back garden and I can see a very nice little crescent Moon, to the top left and just above it I can see Mars, which has a lovely red glow, and a bit lower towards the horizon there's a really bright light and that's Venus," she said.

"If it were clearer, I could see all of it, the only one you wouldn't be able to see is Uranus, you'd need a telescope."

In Hexham, near the border with Scotland, Dan Pye from the Kielder Observatory said seeing the planets in alignment offered perspective about our place in the solar system.

He said: "Over the course of the night the distance between these objects shifts as the moon goes around us, we move a little further around the sun, and the planets continue their journeys around the sun.

"I think witnessing this, helps you realise that connection we have to the cosmic ballet we have with other objects in just our very local space theatre."

Ms Robertson, an amateur astronomer, said that 98% of people in the UK lived under polluted skies.

"It's a shame because that's our home galaxy, another part of being human that is being denied to lots of people," she said.

"When we look at the night sky, things like Ta**us, the Pleiades, the Moon, they've been the same for the whole of human existence."

But she said that unlike other types of pollution, this one was relatively easy to fix permanently.

24/08/2023

Telescopes have previously detected silicates in so-called brown dwarfs. These are essentially star-like objects that have failed to ignite properly. But this is a first for a planet-sized object.

To make the detection, Webb used its Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri), part-built in the UK, and its Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NirSpec).

They didn't take pretty pictures of the planet, at least not in this instance. What they did was tease apart the light coming from VHS 1256b into its component colours as a way to discern the composition of the atmosphere.

"JWST is the only telescope that can measure all these molecular and dust features together," said Miri co-principal investigator Prof Gillian Wright, who directs the STFC UK Astronomy Technology Centre, also in Edinburgh.

"The dynamic picture of the atmosphere of VHS 1256b provided by this study is a prime example of the discoveries enabled by using the advanced capabilities of Miri and NirSpec together."

JWST's primary mission is to observe the pioneer stars and galaxies that first shone just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But a key objective is to investigate exoplanets. In Miri and NirSpec it has the tools to study their atmospheres in unprecedented detail.

Scientists hope they might even be able to tell whether some exoplanets have conditions suitable to host life.

Astronomers are reporting Webb's observations of VHS 1256b in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

James Webb is a collaborative project of the US, European and Canadian space agencies. It was launched in December 2021 and is regarded as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.

18/08/2023

A raging dust storm has been observed on a planet outside our Solar System for the first time.

It was detected on the exoplanet known as VHS 1256b, which is about 40 light-years from Earth.

It took the remarkable capabilities of the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make the discovery.

The dust particles are silicates - small grains comprising silicon and oxygen, which form the basis of most rocky minerals.

But the storm detected by Webb isn't quite the same phenomenon you would get in an arid, desert region on our planet. It's more of a rocky mist.

"It's kind of like if you took sand grains, but much finer. We're talking silicate grains the size of smoke particles," explained Prof Beth Biller from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, UK.

"That's what the clouds on VHS 1256b would be like, but a lot hotter. This planet is a hot, young object. The cloud-top temperature is maybe similar to the temperature of a candle flame," she told BBC News.

07/08/2023

The Chile facility observed the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB - a pervasive but faint glow of long-wavelength radiation that comes to us from the very edge of the observable Universe.

ACT mapped the subtle distortions in this ancient light that were introduced as it passed by all intervening matter.

You can liken it to the way light is bent as it passes through the bulges and bumps in an old glass window pane.

If you know what you're looking at outside, you can use the distortions to say something about the glass.

In the same way, the CMB can be decoded to reveal all intervening structure on its journey to us.

There have been "gravitational lensing" detections similar to this in the past, most notably by the European Space Agency's Planck observatory a decade ago. But ACT surpasses all in terms of resolution and sensitivity.

01/08/2023

It's being described as the most detailed ever map of the influence of dark matter through cosmic history.

A telescope in Chile has traced the distribution of this mysterious stuff on a quarter of the sky and across almost 14 billion years of time.

The result is once again a spectacular confirmation of Einstein's ideas.

Although dark matter makes up about 85% of all mass in the Universe, it's extremely difficult to detect and defies a ready description.

But dark matter influences the large scale structure of everything we see - where all the galaxies are, where the voids in space are. It's the scaffolding on which the visible structure of the Universe is hung.

It neither emits nor absorbs light. The only way you can very obviously infer its presence is through its interplay with gravity.

Big rotating galaxies of stars would fly apart were it not for the inclusion of some unseen mass pulling on them and keeping them intact.

But dark matter will bend, or lens, background light, and this is how its whereabouts was mapped by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT).

27/07/2023

Scientists have revealed how Nasa satellites detected the brightest gamma ray explosion in space.

The gamma-ray burst (GRB) occurred two billion light-years from Earth and illuminated much of the galaxy.

Images of the rare and powerful cosmic phenomenon show a halo and "bullseye" like shapes.

Experts, including academics from the University of Leicester, say the GRB was 10 times brighter than any other previously detected.

They have released detailed analysis of the powerful explosion that was spotted on 9 October, 2022.

The blast was officially named GRB 221009A but has been nicknamed the BOAT - Brightest Of All Time - by those working on a mission Nasa calls Swift.

Edna Johnson

10/10/2023

22/09/2023

08/09/2023

06/09/2023

01/09/2023

29/08/2023

24/08/2023

18/08/2023

07/08/2023

01/08/2023

27/07/2023

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