Information Technology

The European Space Agency (ESA) has formally declared that the Envisat environmental and remote sensing satellite mission is now over, following the satellite's 8 April loss of contact and subsequent failure to reestablish it.

Spaceflight Inc. has unveiled its Sherpa in-space tug vehicle to inject hosted payloads into different orbits.

Congress will likely appropriate around $500 million for NASA's commercial crew programme, well short of the $830 million in the Obama administration's FY2013 budget request, according to the latest budget markups.

SpaceX has delayed the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, the first privately-owned capsule to the International Space Station (ISS), for an additional week.

When a magnitude-8.6 quake struck in the Indian Ocean last week, millions of people were forced to play an awful waiting game. With memories of the tsunami that devastated the region in 2004 still fresh, residents fled from the coasts, not knowing whether waves were on their way.

As NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft crossed the halfway mark en route to its 6 August landing and deployment aboard the Curiosity rover that will carry it around the Martian surface to collect and test soil samples, the US space agency this month has kicked off a new round of planning for future missions to our nearest neighbour.

In one type of quantum computer, trapped ions store quantum information, or qubits. Making calculations means bringing these ions together, which in a big machine becomes inefficient. To get around that, David Kielpinski at Griffith University in Nathan, Queensland, Australia, and colleagues have proposed a scheme that incorporates ions with another approach to quantum computing, superconducting circuits. Each ion is held inside a capacitor, so it forms part of a circuit.

Russia is stepping in to save a long-standing European Space Agency plan for a two-legged mission to Mars launching in 2016 and 2018 that had looked to be doomed because of NASA budget problems.

Lockheed Martin, contracted to build the third-generation global positioning system (GPS) satellites, expects the launch date of the first GPS III satellite to be delayed from mid-2014 to an undetermined date.

A crucial Earth-observing satellite has gone silent, and its controllers say that the chances of restoring contact are slim. Replacements will not be launched for more than a year, so earth scientists face a significant gap in their data collection.