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WASHINGTON — Facing rising costs, the European Space Agency is looking at ways to revise the design of a large X-ray space telescope, an effort that could have implications for NASA’s own astrophysics program. ESA selected the Athena mission in 2014 as one of the two flagship astrophysical missions, along with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Athena — the name comes from the Advanced Telescope for High-Energy Astrophysics — will launch in the mid-2030s to study supermassive black holes, supernova explosions, and other X-ray sources using large X-ray mirrors. At the time of the election, each mission had an estimated cost to ESA of 1.05 billion euros ($1.07 billion), or about 1.17 billion euros today, said Paul McNamara, ESA’s astronomy and astrophysics coordinator, during a July 21 presentation to NASA astronomers and astrophysicists. committee. However, in 2019, the combined price of Athens and LISA has grown to 2.5 billion euros. As of May 2022, LISA had an estimated

Venus has almost become a “forgotten planet”, with only one space mission carried out there in the last 30 years. But the recent resurgence of interest in Earth’s closest neighbor led NASA and ESA to commit to three new missions to Venus, all set to launch in the early 2030s. ESA’s EnVision Venus mission is scheduled to take high-resolution optical, spectral and radar images of the planet’s surface. But to do so, the van-sized spacecraft would need to perform a special maneuver called aerobraking to gradually slow down and lower its orbit through the planet’s hot, thick atmosphere. Aerobraking uses atmospheric drag to slow the spacecraft and EnVision will make thousands of passes through Venus’ atmosphere over about two years. Aerobraking maneuvers are a necessity for the mission. Remove All Ads in Universe Today Join our Patreon for only $3! Get an ad-free experience for life “EnVision as it is currently understood could not have occurred without this lengthy aerobraking phase,” sa

Launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the International Space Station has been delayed by nearly a month because the Falcon 9 booster was damaged during transport. The Crew-5 mission — the fifth of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program — will now launch no earlier than September 29. The launch was supposed to start in early September, meaning the mission has been delayed by nearly a month. The revised schedule will allow SpaceX to “complete hardware processing,” according to a NASA statement. SpaceX is preparing a Falcon 9 booster for its maiden voyage, but obstacles along the way have resulted in some extra work and scheduling changes, as NASA explains: SpaceX removed and replaced the rocket interstage and some onboard instrumentation after hardware was damaged during transportation from SpaceX’s production plant in Hawthorne, California, to the company’s McGregor test facility in Texas for stage testing. The SpaceX team completed – and the NASA team reviewed – load, shock, and struct

This is one of the new images of the Sun from ESA’s Solar Orbiter’s closest approach on March 26, 2022. Credit: ESA Astronomers have proposed a concept mission to fly a neutrino observatory into orbit around the sun to get a better picture of what’s going on in the sun’s core. Astronomers have very few tools to peer into the heart of the sun. Fortunately, the constant nuclear reactions taking place in the sun’s core as hydrogen combine to form helium release a relentless flood of neutrinos. Neutrinos are tiny, ghost-like particles that almost never interact with matter. On Earth we’ve built giant detectors to catch the occasional neutrino. Astronomers have used these neutrinos to understand the nuclear processes taking place inside the sun and to probe the edges of known physics. But our observatories on Earth are basically limited because our planet is so far from the sun. So what if we took the neutrino observatory into space? A te

Stuttgart – A team of scientists in the Department of Physical Intelligence at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has combined robotics with biology by equipping E. coli bacteria with artificial components to build a biohybrid microrobot. First, as can be seen in Figure 1, the team attached several nanoliposomes to each bacterium. In its outer ring, this spherical carrier encloses a material (ICG, green particle) that melts when illuminated by near infrared light. Further to the center, within the aqueous core, liposomes encapsulate water-soluble chemotherapeutic drug (DOX) molecules. The second component the researchers attached to the bacteria were magnetic nanoparticles. When exposed to a magnetic field, the iron oxide particles serve as a boost over these already highly motile microorganisms. In this way, it is easier to control the bacterial pool – a design refined towards in vivo applications. Meanwhile, the binding strap of liposomes and magnetic particles in