A European mission to intercept and deflect an asteroid now has a target: asteroid Didymos. The proposed Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment mission couldn't have had better timing, sounding a call for proposals in the days before a huge meteorite exploded above northern Russia and an even larger chunk of space rock gave Earth a close shave.
The first real lunar base should look literally out-of-this-world cool. Maybe it will look as spacey as Apple's new campus, or Virgin's Spaceport America. Foster + Partners, the architectural firm to dream up those ideas, has a new lunar-base concept for the European Space Agency. (Let's hope it is better-executed than Las Vegas' beleaguered Harmon Hotel.)
The Skylon, a concept spaceplane that (theoretically) could go from a standing start to orbit and back without disposing of any rocket stages, took another big step forward today as tests independently audited by the European Space Agency confirmed that the Sabre engine underpinning it is conceptually sound. It's the second key endorsement from the ESA that Skylon and the Sabre engine have picked up in the past two years - giving Sabre-maker Reaction Engines cause to call its technology the biggest engine breakthrough since the jet.
Something strange happens to spacecraft swinging past Earth for a gravity boost - they suddenly speed up, and their trajectories change in unexpected ways. It's a tiny change, but enough that physicists have started to take notice. The European Space Agency is planning a new mission that could measure this gravity anomaly and figure out if a new, unknown physics is at work.
The workhorse of the European Space Agency's earth observation initiative went silent over the weekend, and the agency admits today that it hasn't heard a beep from the aging satellite since Sunday. The nearly-nine-ton spacecraft is in a stable orbit, but if the problem persists the ESA may have to finally retire Envisat, which has been in orbit twice as long as it was designed to be.
A large metallic ball has fallen from the heavens and landed in a remote region of Namibia, spurring a lot of speculation about its origins and spurring local authorities to get NASA and the European Space Agency on the horn. No one is sure where the hollow metallic object came from, but it definitely came down hard - it was found 18 metres away from its landing site, a hole more than 30 cms deep and about 3 and a half metres across.
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