23 October 2017
Space race ramps up between Blue Origin and SpaceX
... as an upper stage on the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles. The Raptor prototype is powered by densified liquid methane and liquid oxygen, and it will have over three times the thrust of the Merlin 1D engine that...
13 December 2017
Bright spots suggest Ceres is surprisingly active
... a fractured surface. The upsurge of briny water driven to the surface by a small amount of gas such as water vapour, methane or ammonia – in the the way champagne gushes out of its bottle when the cork is removed – boiled off...
23 March 2018
ESA selects ARIEL to look closely at exoplanets
... layers, and making them easier to detect. Well-known ingredients such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane will be searched for with ARIEL’s metre-class telescope that looks at the molecules in visible and infrared...
20 August 2018
Galaxy should be teeming with water-worlds say researchers
... molecular compounds that make up the water-worlds are molecules such as water (H2O), ammonia (NH3) and methane (CH4), along with a small amount of gas. "We have looked at how mass relates to radius, and developed a model...
29 August 2018
New national launch record for China
.... Landspace’s ambitions do not stop there either, as the company said in July that it has designed a two-stage methane- and liquid-oxygen-powered rocket that it aims to ground test next year ahead of its debuting launch...
20 September 2018
TESS finds its first exoplanet – a super-Earth 60 light years away
... found exoplanet, is around four times as massive as Earth and contains a substantial portion of lighter materials — such as water, methane, hydrogen, and helium — in addition to a rocky/iron core. Not a lot is known about systems such as these...