A few years ago, Vanessa Wyche was in the launch control complex at Kennedy Space Center when she saw a woman wearing a Clemson University lanyard attached to a NASA badge.

“Hey,” she said excitedly to Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.

Despite studying at Clemson’s engineering department for a few years at the same time, the women had never met.

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Corey Gray and Sharon Yellowfly want to bring gravitational wave astronomy to speakers of the language.

WHENEVER HER SON DETECTS A strange force rippling in the fabric of spacetime, such as a gravitational wave or binary black hole, Sharon Yellowfly begins the delicate work of translating the vocabulary of his work—astrophysics—into Blackfoot, an indigenous language. Blackfoot traditionally has no words for these kinds of observations. Sometimes her act of translation is as simple as mashing two words together. Other times, it rises to the level of poetry. After hearing an astronomer describe the sound black holes make as a “chirp,” Yellowfly translated the term into biixiini_gi, or “bird singing.”

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Research that unveiled the most mysterious objects in the cosmos has garnered science’s highest honor.

Three scientists who cemented the reality of black holes have been jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany and Andrea Ghez of UCLA will split the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 6.

Black holes are massive objects with a gravitational field so strong that nothing can escape once it falls within, not even light. At their centers, black holes harbor a puzzling zone called a singularity, where the laws of physics cease to make sense.

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Image Credit: NRAO, AUI, NSF, D. BERRY/SKYWORKS

Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir captured the world’s attention with their historic all-woman spacewalk at the end of 2019. The 2020s is beginning with the duo scheduled to repeat their historic first twice more by the end of January. Is the future of spaceflight female?

If popular culture mirrors society, it is clear society craves more women in science, engineering, and space — not in skimpy skirts and silent roles, but as central characters that drive the story. Hidden Figures, a 2016 movie based on the book by the same name, told us the forgotten story of three African American women who helped launch John Glenn into orbit during America’s Jim Crow era.

Read the full article by by Inga Popovaite here.

Image credit: NASA

NASA  is going to be testing a new precision landing system designed for use on the tough terrain of the moon and Mars for the first time during an upcoming mission of Blue Origin’s New Shepard reusable suborbital rocket. The “Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution” (SPLICE) system is made up of a number of lasers, an optical camera and a computer to take all the data collected by the sensors and process it using advanced algorithms, and it works by spotting potential hazards, and adjusting landing parameters on the fly to ensure a safe touchdown.

SPLICE will get a real-world test of three of its four primary subsystems during a New Shepard mission to be flown relatively soon. The Jeff Bezos -founded company typically returns its first-stage booster to Earth after making its trip to the very edge of space, but on this test of SPLICE, NASA’s automated landing technology will be operating on board the vehicle the same way they would when approaching the surface of the moon or Mars. The elements tested will include “terrain relative navigation,” Doppler radar and SPLICE’s descent and landing computer, while a fourth major system — lidar-based hazard detection — will be tested on future planned flights.

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Image credit: Blue Origin

Delayed a year by a launch failure, the coronavirus pandemic and a stretch of stiff upper level winds this summer, an Italian-made Vega rocket vaulted into orbit from French Guiana on Wednesday night and deployed 53 small satellites from 13 countries to punctuate a flawless return to flight mission.

The rideshare launch set a record for the most satellites ever flown on a European rocket, and helped validate process changes introduced to resolve the problem on the Vega’s second stage that caused a failure on the launcher’s previous mission.

Photo Optique Video du CSG – JM Guillon

Lightsail 2 is hardly the only satellite watching the storm: a host of missions run by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are also studying Laura in order to better keep meteorologists and disaster response experts apprised.

Hurricane Laura is currently a Category 3 storm based on its wind speeds and will likely strengthen to a Category 4 storm later today (Aug. 26) before making landfall, according to a forecast from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center.

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SAN FRANCISCO – Satellite propulsion startup Benchmark Space Systems announced an agreement Aug. 5 to provide non-toxic chemical propulsion for rideshare provider Spaceflight Inc.’s next-generation orbital transfer vehicle, Sherpa-NG.

At the same time, Burlington, Vermont-based Benchmark revealed a permanent licensing partnership with Tesseract Space, a California propulsion startup. Under the terms of the deal, Vermont-based Benchmark will integrate Tesseract’s intellectual property, assets and staff to further its goal of providing non-toxic chemical propulsion for the global small satellite market.

The partnership with Tesseract will help Benchmark offer a broad range of non-toxic propulsion systems for satellites ranging in size from one-unit cubesats to Spaceflight’s Sherpa-NG, Chris Carella, Bechmark executive vice president of business development and strategy, told SpaceNews. “I’m hoping people realize that they can work with one partner and get the right green propulsion solution for every mission,” he added.

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