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New Frontiers: U.S. Space Force, Zenno, and SpaceX Propel the Next Era of Space Innovation

The US Space Force is making headlines by awarding contracts to Viasat and Intelsat for new anti-jam communication satellites. These are part of a program to develop a jam-resistant satellite communication fleet, and it’s a pretty big investment—we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.On a global scale, there's some exciting news from Zenno Astronautics—they've become the first company to operate a superconducting product in space, which is a huge leap for space infrastructure technology.And if we zoom in a bit, there’s also a lot of buzz around SpaceX and its recent IPO. The company's shares have been soaring, and it’s causing a lot of excitement in the market.It’s definitely an exciting time in space industry! 

The disintegrating exoplanet K2-22b

Exoplanet surveys have yielded many surprises over the years, and the discovery of "disintegrating" exoplanets was one of them. These are planets that produce asymmetric shapes in the dips of the light curves seen as they transit across the faces of their stars. The asymmetry is hypothesized to be due to tails of dusty material from the planets' disintegration. At present, only three such planets known around main sequence stars, one being K2-22b. There are currently over 3800 confirmed exoplanets, suggesting either that such objects are intrinsically rare or that they have very short lifetimes, in which case it is lucky to catch any in the act of disintegration. These systems have been under intense study to better understand their formation and evolution and to constrain the properties of the grains in the dust tails.

from Astronomy News - Space News, Exploration News, Earth Science News, Earth Science http://bit.ly/2DoKTLr

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