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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
A helicopter is going to Titan. Could...
What are the hydrocarbon seas on Titan really like? While the upcoming Dragonfly helicopter mission to Saturn’s hazy and frigid moon should arrive by 2034 to explore Titan’s atmosphere, the need remains for a mission that could study the moon’s mysterious seas and lakes, filled with liquid hydrocarbons.

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Scientists demonstrate time reflection of electromagnetic waves
When we look in a mirror, we are used to seeing our faces looking back at us. The reflected images are produced by electromagnetic light waves bouncing off of the mirrored surface, creating the common phenomenon called spatial reflection. Similarly, spatial reflections of sound waves form echoes that carry our words back to us in the same order we spoke them.

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Magnetism fosters unusual electronic order in quantum...
Physicists were surprised by the 2022 discovery that electrons in magnetic iron-germanium crystals could spontaneously and collectively organize their charges into a pattern featuring a standing wave. Magnetism also arises from the collective self-organization of electron spins into ordered patterns, and those patterns rarely coexist with the patterns that produce the standing wave of electrons physicists call a charge density wave.

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Synchronizing Galileo's satellites with an ensemble of...
Europe’s Galileo is the world’s most precise satellite navigation system, providing meter-level accuracy and very precise timing to its four billion users. An essential ingredient to ensure this stays the case are the atomic clocks aboard each satellite, delivering pinpoint timekeeping that is maintained to a few billionths of a second. These clocks are called atomic because their “ticks” come from ultra-rapid, ultra-stable oscillation of atoms between different energy states. Sustaining this performance demands, in turn, even more accurate...

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Can cosmic collisions be predicted before they...
On August 17, 2017, about 70 telescopes collectively turned their gaze to a fiery collision between two dead stars that took place millions of light-years away. The telescopes watched the event unfold in a rainbow of wavelengths, from radio waves to visible light to the highest-energy gamma rays. As the pair of ultra-dense neutron stars crashed into each other, they flung debris outward that glowed for days, weeks, and months. Some of the onlooking telescopes spotted gold, platinum, and...

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Observations inspect X-ray radiation from Vela X-1
Using the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), an international team of astronomers has conducted X-ray polarimetric observations of an accreting X-ray pulsar known as Vela X-1. Results of the observational campaign, presented March 3 on the arXiv pre-print server, deliver important insights into the properties of X-ray radiation from this pulsar.

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