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Last week, the space agency announced that it had selected 14 agencies to develop technology that would allow for sustainable moon missions by the end of the decade.The network will provide communication for data transmission, including command and control functions, the remote navigation of lunar robots, and streaming high-definition video.Astronauts will be able to communicate via voice and video as well as exchange biometric data through the wireless communications, Nokia says. Read moreSetting up a lunar network is more challenging than achieving the same task on Earth, but Nokia says that its equipment has been specifically designed to withstand both the difficult conditions of the launch and will continue to operate in space without an atmosphere.Nokia also expects to upgrade from a 4G to a 5G system in time.”Leveraging our rich and successful history in space technologies, from pioneering satellite communication to discovering the cosmic microwave background radiation produced by the Big Bang, we are now building the first ever cellular communications network on the Moon”, Marcus Weldon, Chief Technology Officer at Nokia, said in a statement.“Reliable, resilient and high-capacity communications networks will be key to supporting sustainable human presence on the lunar surface.”The move is a part of Nasa’s $28 billion plan to send the first woman and the next man to the moon, the first time since 1972 that humans have set foot on its surface.The plan involves test flights in 2021 and 2023, before a crewed mission in 2024.“We’re going back to the moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers. As we build up a sustainable presence, we’re also building momentum toward those first human steps on the Red Planet”, Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine said last month.This is not the first time that Nasa has attempted to launch a mobile network on the moon. In 2018, Nokia and Vodafone worked with Nasa to try and launch ultra-light mobile masts using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket; the project, however, was never completed.

Our Milky Way is surrounded by a “clumpy halo” that could be hiding mysterious missing matter, astronomers have said.The galaxy is wrapped in a ring of hot gases that are constantly being topped up as stars are born and die, scientists say.And inside that halo could be basic matter that has been missing since the birth of the universe, researchers say.The new discoveries are based on observations made by HaloSat, a “minisatellite” funded by Nasa’s Astrophysics Division and built by the University of Iowa. Its findings are reported in a new article published in the journal Nature Astronomy.The heated halo is called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM, and helped nurture the Milky Way when it was formed around 10 billion years ago. Researchers built the spacecraft to look for X-rays being sent out by the CGM, in an attempt to better understand it, its behaviour and shape.All galaxies have their own CGM, and understanding how they operate is key to explaining not just how the galaxies formed but how they could become the busy mix of stars, planets and other objects that we live in today.”Where the Milky Way is forming stars more vigorously, there are more X-ray emissions from the circumgalactic medium,” says Philip Kaaret, professor in the Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy and corresponding author on the new study.”That suggests the circumgalactic medium is related to star formation, and it is likely we are seeing gas that previously fell into the Milky Way, helped make stars, and now is being recycled into the circumgalactic medium.”The chief aim of HaloSat was to look for baryonic matter, atomic remnants that are believed to have been missing since the universe was born almost 14 billion years ago. Researchers think that matter could be hiding in the CGM and that examining it could help them find that long lost matter.In order to answer that question, the researchers attempted to build a picture of the nature of the CGM itself. With the help of the minisatellite, they wanted to understand whether the halo is large and extended, perhaps many times the mass of our galaxy – in which case there would be enough atoms to include the missing baryonic matter – or if it was instead thin and puffy, made up of recycled material and so not a likely home for the lost matter.The new research is inconclusive.”What we’ve done is definitely show that there’s a high-density part of the CGM that’s bright in X-rays, that makes lots of X-ray emissions,” Professor Kaaret said. “But there still could be a really big, extended halo that is just dim in X-rays. And it might be harder to see that dim, extended halo because there’s this bright emission disc in the way.”So it turns out with HaloSat alone, we really can’t say whether or not there really is this extended halo.”But the data did show that the halo was unexpectedly clumpy, with dense regions where stars are forming and material is being sent back and forth between the CGM and the galaxy.”It seems as if the Milky Way and other galaxies are not closed systems,” Kaaret says. “They’re actually interacting, throwing material out to the CGM and bringing back material as well.”But by mixing the data from the minisatellite with other observations from around the world, astronomers hope they are getting closer to understanding where all of that matter might be.”Those missing baryons better be somewhere,” Professor Kaaret said. “They’re in halos around individual galaxies like our Milky Way or they’re located in filaments that stretch between galaxies.”An article describing the research, ‘A disc-dominated and clumpy circumgalactic medium of the Milky Way seen in X-ray emission’, is published online in Nature Astronomy  on 19 October.

Scientists have solved a fundamental problem that had prevented a “miracle material” from being used in next-generation solar cells.The breakthrough paves the way for the widely acclaimed mineral perovskite to transform the solar industry through cheaper and more efficient photovoltaics, according to researchers in Australia who made the discovery.Perovskite, which is forged deep within the Earth’s mantle, has been hailed for its unprecedented potential to convert sunlight into electricity. Researchers have already improved its sunlight-to-energy efficiency from around 3 per cent to over 20 per cent in the space of just a few years.“It’s unbelievable, a miracle material,” Z. Valy Vardeny, a materials science professor from the University of Utah, said about perovskite in 2017.At the time it was thought that it would be at least 10 years before it reached a point that the material could be used in commercial solar cells, however the latest breakthrough could see the wide uptake of the technology much sooner.Read more”It was one of those unusual discoveries that you sometimes hear about in science,” said Dr Hall from the University of Melbourne.“We were performing a measurement, looking for something else, and then we came across this process that at the time seemed quite strange. However, we quickly realised it was an important observation.”With the help of researchers at the University of Sydney, the scientists were able to use computational modelling to solve the problem of instability within the material when exposed to sunlight.

Nasa is preparing to grab a piece of asteroid and bring it back to Earth.The dramatic manoeuvre will be the culmination of two years that a Nasa spacecraft has spent orbiting and examining an asteroid known as Bennu, hundreds of millions of miles away.The Osiris-Rex mission will see the spacecraft drop onto the asteroid, scoop up a piece of rubble, and stash it away so that it can be brought back down to Earth.The drama will unfold on Tuesday as the US has its first go at collecting asteroid samples for return to Earth, a feat accomplished only by Japan so far.Nasa is looking to bring back at least two ounces (60 grams) worth of asteroid Bennu, the biggest such haul from beyond the moon.The van-sized spacecraft is aiming for the relatively flat middle of a tennis court-sized crater named Nightingale – a spot comparable to a few parking places here on Earth. Boulders as big as buildings loom over the targeted touchdown zone.Read more”So for some perspective, the next time you park your car in front of your house or in front of a coffee shop and walk inside, think about the challenge of navigating Osiris-Rex into one of these spots from 200 million miles away,” Nasa’s deputy project manager Mike Moreau said.Once it drops out of its half-mile-high (0.75 km-high) orbit around Bennu, the spacecraft will take a deliberate four hours to make it all the way down, to just above the surface.Then the action cranks up when Osiris-Rex’s 11-foot (3.4-metre) arm reaches out and touches Bennu.Contact should last five to 10 seconds, just long enough to shoot out pressurised nitrogen gas and suck up the churned dirt and gravel.Programmed in advance, the spacecraft will operate autonomously during the unprecedented touch-and-go manoeuvre. With an 18-minute lag in radio communication each way, ground controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin near Denver cannot intervene.If the first attempt does not work, Osiris-Rex can try again. Any collected samples will not reach Earth until 2023.While Nasa has brought back comet dust and solar wind particles, it has never attempted to sample one of the nearly one million known asteroids lurking in our solar system until now.Japan, meanwhile, expects to get samples from asteroid Ryugu in December – in the milligrams at most – 10 years after bringing back specks from asteroid Itokawa.Bennu is an asteroid picker’s paradise. The big, black, roundish, carbon-rich space rock – taller than New York’s Empire State Building – was around when our solar system was forming 4.5 billion years ago.Scientists consider it a time capsule full of pristine building blocks that could help explain how life formed on Earth and possibly elsewhere.The mission’s principal scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said: “This is all about understanding our origins.”Additional reporting by AP