First Australian-made rocket crashes shortly after lift-off
Videos show the Eris rocket, launched by Gilmour Space Technologies, lifting off the ground before losing momentum and crashing.
Plumes of white smoke then start to rise at Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland.
Gilmour Space Technologies described the test of the orbital rocket as a "giant leap" for the country's space capability.
In a written statement, the company confirmed no-one was injured and that a second launch should take place within six to eight months.
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘A bellwether of change': speed of glacier shrinking on remote Heard Island sounds alarm
Glaciers on a remote Australian sub-Antarctic island are shrinking rapidly, losing almost a quarter of their size in just 70 years, with researchers fearing glaciers on a neighbouring peninsula may have already disappeared. Analysis of aerial photographs and maps going back to 1947 were combined with satellite data to track melting on 29 glaciers on the uninhabited wilderness of Heard Island, 4,100km south-west of Perth and 1,500km north of Antarctica. Scientists said global heating was the most likely cause of the dramatic ice losses. Between 1947 and 2019, the island had warmed by 0.7C, while the area covered by glacial ice fell from 289 sq km to 225 sq km. The most dramatic changes were recorded on the island's east, in particular on Stephenson glacier, which has retreated almost 6km since 1947. In the last 20 years, the glacier retreated on average 178 metres a year, the research, published last week in the scientific journal the Cryosphere, found. 'Glaciers are extremely sensitive to small changes in temperature. As the air warms the ice surface gets closer to melting point,' said Prof Andrew Mackintosh, one of the paper's authors and chief investigator at Monash University's Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future (SAEF). 'I've got no doubt the increase in temperature is primarily responsible for driving the glacier retreat. This shows that no place is free from the influence of climate change.' On the neighbouring Laurens peninsula, where there are 11 small glaciers, the losses were even more dramatic. The 10.5 sq km of glacier ice that was there in 1947 was at just 2.2 sq km in 2019, the final year of data for the research. 'One or two of those glaciers may have already disappeared now,' said Dr Levan Tielidze, the paper's lead author and research fellow at SAEF. 'They are small glaciers, but it's a sign of what will happen in the future to the larger glaciers on Heard. These findings are a bellwether of change for our global climate system.' Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton's Clear Air column as a free newsletter SAEF is now using climate models to understand what could happen to the island's glaciers in the future under different levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Mackintosh said: 'Although this mapping shows stark glacier retreat and further ice loss is unavoidable, whether we retain glaciers or lose most of them entirely is up to humans and the greenhouse gas emission pathway we follow. 'It might also mean the difference between a future where biodiversity is devastated, or one where key parts are secured.' Heard Island made headlines earlier this year when Donald Trump listed it as being subject to a 10% trade tariff, despite nobody actually living there. The pristine world heritage-listed island includes Australia's only active volcano, Big Ben, and is a magnet for seabirds such as penguins, petrels and albatross, as well as elephant seals and unique slow-growing cushion plants. Dr Justine Shaw, an associate professor at SAEF with the Queensland University of Technology, visited the island in 2003. Sign up to Clear Air Australia Adam Morton brings you incisive analysis about the politics and impact of the climate crisis after newsletter promotion 'It is an absolutely mind-blowing place – a glaciated island,' she said. 'You're on a beach surrounded by elephant seals with king penguins all around and then swooping down from the mountain are sooty albatross calling at each other. 'There's this incredible wildlife and you have your feet in black volcanic sand. And it's right at the southern limit of where plants can grow.' The island has only one weed and no other invasive species, she said, which made it a perfect place to study the impact of climate change on the island's biodiversity. Shaw said the glacial retreat could be generating risks for the unique plant life – a combination of cushion plants, a cabbage, and the insects that live on them. More bare ground exposed by the retreating glaciers created a chance invasive plants could take hold, she said. The appearance of a growing lagoon at the bottom of Stephenson glacier could also be destabilising the ground used by birds for nesting. 'The lagoon that's growing there is opened up to the sea. That will cause erosion,' she said. The government's Australian Antarctic Program this week announced two scientific visits to the island later this year – the first expeditions in more than 20 years. Shaw is organising a team of scientists to travel on the expedition to study the island's unique combination of insects and plants that she said existed nowhere else on Earth. While she was not surprised the glaciers were retreating, she added: 'What's amazing is the rate of the melting – it is so rapid.'
The Independent
4 hours ago
- The Independent
Scientists recreate universe's first molecule to crack 13-billion-year-old mystery
Scientists have recreated the first molecule ever to form and found that it likely played a much bigger role in the birth of early stars than previously thought. The universe was unimaginably hot and dense immediately after it formed about 13.8 billion years ago, and cooled down seconds later to form the first elements, hydrogen and helium, albeit in a completely ionised form. It then took another 380,000 years for the temperature in the early universe to drop enough for neutral atoms to form by combining with free electrons to pave the way for the first chemical reactions. The first molecule created this way is thought to be helium hydride ion (HeH+), formed from a neutral helium atom and ionised hydrogen. Helium hydride's origin also marked the beginning of a chain reaction that led to the formation of molecular hydrogen (H2), which is by far the most common molecule in the universe, scientists say. Although the infant universe at this point was transparent due to the binding of free electrons, there were still no light-emitting objects, such as stars. Researchers found that this ancient helium hydride molecule helped cool the universe over a process lasting several hundred million years before the first stars ignited. Stars are powered by nuclear fusion in which light atomic nuclei combine to form a heavier nucleus, releasing a tremendous amount of energy. However, for any early contracting gas cloud of a protostar to collapse to the point where nuclear fusion can begin, heat must be dissipated via collisions between atoms and molecules, which then emit this energy in the form of photons. But below 10,000C, this process becomes ineffective for the dominant hydrogen atoms. So researchers have long considered helium hydride ions as a potentially important candidate for cooling in the formation of the first stars. These ancient molecules could facilitate further cooling by emitting additional energy through rotation and vibration, particularly at low temperatures. The concentration of helium hydride ions in the universe was likely key to the effectiveness of early star formation, the study found. New research, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, used a special ultra-cold lab setup to mimic conditions from over 13 billion years ago that led to the formation of these molecules. The study recreated conditions similar to those in the early universe for the first time at the Cryogenic Storage Ring (CSR) instrument at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Kernphysik – a globally unique lab set up for investigating molecular and atomic reactions under space-like conditions. In the research, scientists superimposed HeH⁺ ions stored in a 35-metre-diameter storage ring for up to just a minute at a few kelvins (-267C) with a beam of neutral hydrogen atoms. They studied how the collision rate varied with temperature and found that, contrary to earlier predictions, the rate at which this reaction proceeds does not slow down with decreasing temperature. 'Previous theories predicted a significant decrease in the reaction probability at low temperatures, but we were unable to verify this in either the experiment or new theoretical calculations by our colleagues,' said study co-author Holger Kreckel from the MPIK. The findings suggest the reactions of HeH⁺ with hydrogen were far more important for chemistry in the early universe than previously thought.
The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin takes 80-year-old adventurer on flight into space
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