WASHINGTON — NASA announced March 23 that it will support development of a second lander to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface to provide competition with SpaceX for the later “sustainable” phase of the Artemis program.

The fine-structure constant is a seemingly random number with no units or dimensions, which has cropped up in so many places in physics, and seems to control one of the most fundamental interactions in the universe.

The European sun-chasing spacecraft Solar Orbiter has snapped the closest images of the sun ever taken, revealing the finest details of our star’s outer atmosphere, the corona. 

Astronomers imaged a weird circle in space in high-definition for the first time as they try to figure out how these mysterious structures form. 

Known as “odd radio circles” (ORCs), the enigmatic shapes were first spotted in 2019 in images from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope. Consisting of 36 colossal dishes located in Western Australia, ASKAP images the entire night sky in radio waves, began seeing circles in various spots.

The industry has ambitions goals that it can accomplish, “but getting the manpower and getting people with the right niche talents into our companies to execute on these ideas is a huge challenge right now,” Cara Sindir, Airbus U.S. Space and Defense chief operations officer, said at the Satellite 2022 conference. “The other part of that challenge is obviously the inflation of salaries. How can we all afford all of these people and how does that play into our business cases?”

WASHINGTON — SpaceX has raised prices for both its Starlink broadband service and for dedicated and rideshare launches, in some cases by up to 20%, citing inflation.

The US omnibus spending bill for fiscal year 2022, passed by the House late March 9 and scheduled to be taken up by the Senate in the next few days, trimmed spending for development of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather satellites, from the requested level of $1.68 billion to $1.29 billion.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission launched in November and will arrive at its destination in late September. If all goes well, the impact will change the orbit of a small asteroid, Dimorphos, around a larger asteroid called Didymos. But just how much the orbit will change is difficult to predict. Leading up to the mission, scientists used samples collected from two different space rocks to test in an attempt to understand the future impact.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea, at least for now, is pushing forward with its planned launch of two satellites on Russian rockets this year. Still, it doesn’t rule out the possibility that the missions could be delayed due to sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine.

WASHINGTON — Bahrain became the latest country to join the Artemis Accords as the agreement regarding principles for cooperation in space exploration continues to expand beyond traditional spacefaring nations.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced March 11 that Ingenuity completed its 21st flight on the planet, traveling 370 meters during the 129-second flight. The helicopter has now traveled more than 4.6 kilometers since its first flight in April 2021.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency decommissioned two missile-tracking satellites that have operated in low Earth orbit for more than 12 years, MDA said March 14.

“When our space station is completed and running, we will actively encourage the private sector to engage in space through various ways,” Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told China Central Television March 9.

More than a dozen former Soyuz satellite missions need new rides after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, raising questions over how fast the launch market can absorb the loss of the workhorse rocket.

NASA’s Mark Vande Hei and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov have long been scheduled to come home from the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 30. And that remains the plan, despite the strain that Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has placed on Russia’s many space partnerships.