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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 low density of some exoplanets is confirmed

The Kepler mission and its extension, called K2, discovered thousands of exoplanets. It detected them using the transit technique, measuring the dip in light intensity whenever an orbiting planet moved across the face of its host star as viewed from Earth. Transits can not only measure the orbital period, they often can determine the size of the exoplanet from the detailed depth and shape of its transit curve and the host star's properties. The transit method, however, does not measure the mass of the planet. The radial velocity method, by contrast, which measures the wobble of a host star under the gravitational pull of an orbiting exoplanet, allows for the measurement of its mass. Knowing a planet's radius and mass allows for the determination of its average density, and hence clues to its composition.

from Astronomy News - Space News, Exploration News, Earth Science News, Earth Science http://bit.ly/2Fr6K5y

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