TAMPA, Florida — Space Norway has restored communications on an undersea fiber-optic cable it operates between its Svalbard satellite station and mainland Norway, which had left the Arctic region without a backup connection after failing Jan. 7.

WASHINGTON — After missing its initial launch window in 2020 in part because of the pandemic, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission is on schedule for a launch in September.

SAN FRANCISCO — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is looking ahead to a future generation of space weather instruments. The agency’s first priority is ensuring the continuity of measurements to be made by the Space Weather Follow-On (SWFO) mission sensor suite scheduled to travel to Lagrange Point 1 in 2025 on NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration probe.

Space-based services and applications are increasingly important in our daily life, for the economy, the environment, the resources’ management and for our security. In 2011, the United States National Security Space Strategy defined space as “a domain that no nation owns but on which all rely, [which] is becoming increasingly congested, contested, and competitive”.

U.K.-based Space Entertainment Enterprise (SEE) has announced plans to launch a movie production studio module intended to connect to the International Space Station (ISS). 

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has reached its deep-space destination, but it’ll be a while yet before the $10 billion observatory starts its science work.

Scientists observed changes in the signals coming from rapidly-spinning stars called millisecond pulsars that might point to the existence of subtle space-time ripples vibrating throughout the entire universe.

Chinese scientists have built an “artificial moon” research facility that will enable them to simulate low-gravity environments using magnetism. 

Researchers used NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to film a year on an exoplanet called XO-3b. Conveniently, a year on this world lasts only three Earth days. Within that time, the exoplanet experiences a one-day-long summer and a two-day-long winter — and while the seasons pass fast, they’re also awfully dramatic.

One of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes, Mount Vesuvius, appears to “peer up” into the sky through an eerily circular hole in the clouds in this striking satellite image.

ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA is starting to implement recommendations of the astrophysics decadal survey by announcing plans for a new line of missions and laying the groundwork for future large space telescopes.

TAMPA, Fla. — Space Norway said Jan. 13 it expects to start repairing next month one of two undersea fiber-optic cables it operates between its Svalbard satellite station and mainland Norway, after a failure left the Arctic region without a backup connection.

WASHINGTON — Stratolaunch flew its giant aircraft Jan. 16 for just the third time as company executives promise a higher rate of flight activities this year, including the first flight of a hypersonic test vehicle.

Cosmic Girl, the Boeing 747 aircraft that serves as the launch platform for LauncherOne, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at 4:39 p.m. Eastern. It released the rocket at approximately 5:52 p.m. Eastern, which then ascended to low Earth orbit at an altitude of about 500 kilometers. Virgin Orbit tweeted an hour after release that all seven satellites on the rocket had been deployed.

The Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 10:25 a.m. Eastern Time January 13, 2022. The upper stage reached orbit eight and a half minutes later and, after a second burn 55 minutes after liftoff, deployed its payloads into a 525-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit over the following half-hour.

A powerful underwater volcano eruption in Tonga on Saturday (Jan. 15) was captured as it happened in stunning images from an Earth-watching satellite, showing the sheer power for the explosive event in the South Pacific.