The landing craft that will deliver Europe's first rover to the planet Mars has arrived for assembly and testing in Turin, Italy, and has been officially named. A key component of the ExoMars 2020 mission, the Roscosmos landing platform has been christened "Kazachok" (Cossack).
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The lack of gravity in space means that muscles begin to waste away, and scientists have been studying these health effects on Earth with extended bed-rest experiments. In the latest, those beds will be put in a centrifuge to mimic artificial gravity, to see if that can help offset the issues.
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It's hard to really understand the large-scale structure of the Milky Way. Now, astronomers have peered towards the center of the galaxy using the ESA's X-ray telescope XMM-Newton, and discovered two colossal "chimneys" pumping huge amounts of energy and gas out into intergalactic space.
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When the Gateway outpost is deployed in 2023, it will need an airlock to get any useful work done, so ESA is working on a new egress point for scientific experiments for the cislunar manned laboratory. Based on two independent approaches, the final design will be part of the European module ESPRIT.
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Reaction Engine's Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) comes closer to reality as ESA and the UK Space Agency (UKSA) green light the preliminary design of the hypersonic demonstrator engine core designed to act as both a jet and a rocket.
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It what seems like a paradox, engineers have been blowing up batteries in hopes of cleaning up space debris. In a series of severe "abuse" tests at the test bunkers of France’s CEA, lithium-ion batteries were tortured to better understand catastrophic battery failures and prevent battery explosions.
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The Red Planet is notoriously dry and dusty, but its scarred surface shows that that wasn’t always the case. A new set of photos from the ESA's Mars Express orbiter demonstrates some pretty clear evidence of an ancient river network that once wound across the Martian landscape.
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Most people think that the Earth's atmosphere stops a bit above 62 miles, but a new study based on observations by the US-European SOHO satellite shows that it actually extends as far 391,000 mi (630,000 km) or 50 times the Earth's diameter. This makes the Moon a very high altitude aircraft.
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Space has the prospect of one day getting a bit cleaner as a satellite harpooned a piece of simulated debris in low Earth orbit. The RemoveDEBRIS technology demonstrator deployed a target panel at the end of a boom, then skewered it with a metal harpoon traveling at 20 m/s (44.7 mph, 72 km/h).
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A panel of experts has chosen Rosalind Franklin as the name for the European Space Agency’s (ESA)’s upcoming Mars rover. The vehicle is currently expected to begin exploring the Red Planet in 2021.
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