Several experiments have shown that the EMDrive can generate thrust from basically nothing – in apparent violation of Newton’s Laws of Motion. Unfortunately, a German team has now built and tested their own EMDrive, and found that environmental factors may have been responsible for false positives.
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The US Joint Force Space Command Component has confirmed that at about 5:16 pm PDT on April 1, the derelict Tiangong-1 space station burned up over the southern Pacific Ocean ending weeks of uncertainty as to when and where it would finish its career.
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China's Tiangong-1 space station is set to make an uncontrolled reentry into the Earth's atmosphere on or around April 1 at 00:00 GMT with a margin of error of ±36 hours. It will burn up somewhere between 43º North and 43º South latitudes.
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NASA engineers have determined that the unmanned Kepler Space Telescope has only enough propellant left in its attitude control system to keep it properly oriented for a few more months. When this runs out, the spacecraft will no longer be able to collect data or transmit it to Earth.
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Heads up. After six-and-a-half years circling the Earth, China's first space station, Tiangong-1, is predicted to re-enter the atmosphere in early April – give or take a week – and is expected to break up somewhere between 42.7° North latitude and 42.7° South latitude.
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ESA is looking to develop a spacecraft that could for the first time provide us with a "side-view" of the Sun, improving our ability to predict potentially damaging space weather events such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs).
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Pulsars have been proposed as a space navigation system in the past. Now NASA has demonstrated the viability of the idea, with an experiment showing that a spacecraft can constantly and automatically calculate its position by tracking the perfectly-predictable X-ray signals from an array of pulsars.
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On September 15th, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft ended its hall of fame mission to Saturn with a dramatic plunge into the gas giant’s atmosphere. NASA has now released a mosaic of Saturn and its rings created from images taken by the probe during its final, 293rd orbit of the majestic gas giant.
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With our current technology, the journey to Alpha Centauri would take millennia, but there are plans for tiny probes that could do it in as little as 20 years. Now, a physicist has detailed a method to use magnetic sails as a braking system to slow craft down to a cruising speed once they get there.
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Asteroids have a lot to teach us about the Solar System, but their nomadic nature makes them hard to study. Now a proposed mission called the Asteroid Touring Nanosat Fleet involves sending 50 tiny spacecraft to visit hundreds of asteroids, before bringing their data payloads back to Earth.
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