Storytelling and innovation studio Al Jazeera Contrast, part of the digital division of Al Jazeera Media Network, announced on 13 December that Still Here – an immersive multimedia installation in which formerly imprisoned women collaborate to explore urgent issues surrounding incarceration, erasure and gentrification – will premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontier program.

The visceral experiences of over twelve formerly incarcerated women who have re-entered society are at the core of Still Here, which was conceived as an interactive audio, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experience by Al Jazeera Contrast head and lead creator Zahra Rasool and journalist Sarah Springer, along with a team of creatives from the New York City community.

Told cinematically, and through the lens of a fictional character named Jasmine Smith, who returns to Harlem after 15 years in prison, the narrative is crafted together with women who have spent time in prison and are part of Women’s Prison Association (WPA).

According to Al Jazeera, Still Here represents “a pioneering transmedia approach to storytelling and signifies a new direction in collaborative and community-centered, immersive journalism”.

“Providing direct access to personal stories and voices that matter is at the heart of our mission, and we are thrilled that the Sundance Film Festival recognizes the importance of inclusion and the necessity to democratize the creative process and push the boundaries of traditional narratives,” Rasool said in a statement.

“As a digital news media organization, we are charged with a responsibility to bring the world’s most pressing and crucial stories to life in compelling and impactful ways,” added Carlos Van Meek, Director of Digital Innovation and Programming for Al Jazeera Digital.

“This first-time selection by the Sundance Film Festival is an honor and signifies a new level of international recognition for the groundbreaking content the Al Jazeera Contrast team are creating,” he said.

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Since launching in 2017, Al Jazeera Contrast has received multiple international awards, including an Emmy nomination in the “Outstanding New Approaches: Current News” category, alongside the New York Times, Time Magazine, and the Center for Investigative Reporting for Yemen’s Skies of Terror.

Rasool’s team is the only all-female news team specializing in immersive technology and the nomination marked the first time Al Jazeera Digital has been recognized in the News and Documentary Emmy competition.

In a blog post published on 18 December, Seattle-based web services giant Amazon announced that it had selected a site in Redmond, Washington, for the research and development (R&D) headquarters of its Project Kuiper, a new initiative to “launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites” to “provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities” globally.

Announced earlier this year, Project Kuiper is a big, billion dollar project that will take years to come to fruition. However, the company claims that the team has, since its inception, made “significant progress towards our goal to serve tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet”.

The project has outgrown its current headquarters, Amazon said, so the company is leasing and renovating a long term home for the team in Redmond, which is intended to be its “primary headquarters for research & development” and its “primary prototype manufacturing and qualification facility”.

The new facility will consist of two buildings with a total of 219,000 square feet of space, including offices and design space, R&D labs and prototype manufacturing facilities. Renovations on the facility are already underway and the move into the new site is planned for 2020.

Amazon has invested over US$38 billion in the Greater Seattle Area since 2010, including infrastructure and compensation. It claims to have created over 53,000 jobs in the region and estimates that its investments have contributed to the creation of an additional 244,000 jobs on top of its direct hires.

“Kuiper is another large initiative for us and our commitment to this project will of course result in further investments by Amazon in infrastructure and compensation,” the company said.

Some private companies, including SpaceX and OneWeb, are reportedly lobbying against the company’s efforts to acquire regulatory approval for the planned Kuiper internet constellation. The US government originally gave nine companies licenses to use the Ka-band portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and Amazon is asking for waiver allowing it to gain access as well.

The companies that were originally granted access have argued that giving Amazon access will interfere with their plans as there would be too many satellites attempting to use the same frequencies. It is still unclear whether the waiver will be granted but the government has said that since the companies will not all end up launching satellite constellations, there might be room for other players.

Pittsburgh-based space robotics company Astrobotic said on 2 October that it’s CubeRover – an ultralight, rechargeable planetary rover – program had been awarded a US$2 million NASA Tipping Point contract, which the company expects to provide “the final push” to bring the product to market.

According to Astrobotic, the rover is “roughly the size of a shoebox”, weighs less than five pounds and can carry its own payloads or team up with other CubeRovers as “scouts” for larger rovers and landers.

The company expects the first CubeRover to fly to the Moon aboard the Peregrine lunar lander on Astrobotic’s flagship mission in 2021, set to be the first by an American-built lander since the Apollo missions.

The CubeRover project is the only rover selected by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for a Tipping Point award. The awards look to invest in American aerospace businesses whose products are at a “tipping point” in their development, allowing NASA funding to provide a “final nudge” to completion.

Astrobotic said that the rover was named for “its unique modular, scalable design”, claiming that it will offer “a low-cost delivery service to the lunar surface, making the Moon accessible to commercial customers for the first time”.

According to Astrobotic, the contract will allow the CubeRovers to be fitted with a lighter all-wheel-drive system, a large solar array for rechanged, and standardized interfaces for coupling with various types of landers and payloads.

Astrobotic plans to partner with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to provide the CubeRover with a “smart vision system”, which would be able to adapt its resolution to specific tasks – e.g. high definition for science-based tasks and low definition for navigation – to preserve bandwidth.

The company developed the CubeRover in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and the NASA Kennedy Space Center, with partial funding coming from NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program.

“We are honored to receive the Tipping Point award, which will enable our rovers to provide exactly the capabilities space agencies, businesses, and institutions are asking for,” Mike Provenzano, Astrobotic’s Director of Planetary Mobility, said in a statement. “We’re incredibly excited to make the CubeRover product line available to the world.”

Astrobotic “seeks to make space accessible to the world”. The company’s lunar lander, Peregrine, delivers payloads to the Moon for companies, governments, universities, non-profits, and individuals for US$1.2 million per kilogram.

Astrobotic was selected by NASA in May 2019 for a $79.5 million contract to deliver payloads to the Moon in 2021, and has over 30 prior and ongoing NASA and commercial technology contracts, a commercial partnership with Airbus DS, and a corporate sponsorship with DHL. The company is also an official partner with NASA through the Lunar CATALYST Program.

On 3 October, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced the 64 teams from 21 states and Puerto Rico that will take part in the 2020 NASA Student Launch competition to design, build, test and fly a payload and high-powered amateur rocket.

The rockets are required to reach an altitude of between 4,000 and 5,500 feet, and all teams must meet multiple documentation and presentation milestones with NASA rocketry experts as they develop their rocket.

New to the competition is the college division’s payload challenge. In the past, the teams were given payload options to develop, such as a rover or unmanned aerial vehicle. In 2020, the teams must collect a specific amount of simulated lunar ice from the launch field, before navigating to a specified distance.

The payload task resembles aspects of mission design and planning faced by NASA and industry engineers when exploring planetary bodies, such as the Moon, which has water ice at its south pole.

Teams in the middle/high school division can choose to complete in the college division payload challenge or they can develop a scientific or engineering payload of their own design. As introduced in the 2019 competition, teams will continue to “call their shot” and predict their rocket’s altitude.

When teams submit their preliminary design review package to NASA in November this year, one of the key milestones in the competition year, they will submit their predictions and target altitudes for launch day, to be held in Huntsville, Alabama in April 2020.

Teams are also evaluated and given points and awards in nearly a dozen other categories including safety, vehicle design, social media presence and STEM engagement. The STEM award “encourages and recognizes teams for sharing their knowledge and experiences with the next generation of engineers, scientists and explorers”.

Marshall’s Office of STEM Engagement manages Student Launch to “stimulate innovation and advance NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations mission through collaboration with educational institutions and students”.

NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement looks to further the agency’s goal of encouraging students to pursue degrees and careers in the STEM fields through multiple challenges, including the Student Launch competition.

The Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and the Office of STEM Engagement, along with Northrop Grumman and the Huntsville chapter of the National Space Club, provide funding and leadership for the initiative.

Entering its third decade of competition, Student Launch aims to provide a realistic experience for middle school, high school and college students to follow the engineering design process NASA and industry engineers use when developing and operating new hardware.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) announced on 24 October that it is working to develop “space-based solar power transmission capability using high-efficiency solar cells” to collect the sun’s energy, convert it to radio frequencies and beam it back to Earth.

The AFRL said that “providing uninterrupted, assured, and agile power to expeditionary forces operating in unimproved areas such as forward operating bases would provide an advantage to US and allied forces”.

AFRL researchers are focused on “developing and demonstrating some of the key technologies necessary to integrate into a conceptual space-based power beaming system”, the laboratory said.

American global aerospace and defense technology company Northrop Grumman will partner with AFRL, and has been awarded a contract valued at over US$100 million to develop and deliver unspecified hardware elements to support space-based experiments into this new technology.

“Energy is a strategic enabler and potential vulnerability for our nation and our Department of Defense” US Air Force Colonel Eric Felt, director of AFRL’s Space Vehicles Directorate, said in a statement. “To ensure [Department of Defense] mission success we must have the energy we need at the right place at the right time.”

“The Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research (SSPIDR) Project is a very interesting concept that will enable us to capture solar energy in space and precisely beam it to where it is needed,” Felt added. “SSPIDR is part of AFRL’s ‘big idea pipeline’ to ensure we continue to develop game-changing technologies for our Air Force, [Department of Defense], nation, and world.”

AFRL is the primary scientific research and development center for the United States Air Force (USAF), and leads USAF’s “discovery, development and integration of affordable warfighting technologies for [the country’s] air, space and cyberspace force”.

The successful activation – which will be followed by a year-long tech demonstration to see if the clock performs as expected; i.e. how well the clock keeps time down to the nanosecond – was confirmed by the mission team on Friday 23 August.

Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, it is the first clock allegedly stable enough to map a spacecraft’s trajectory in deep space while still small enough to fly onboard said spacecraft.

A more stable clock will be able to operate father from Earth, NASA explained, where it need to be able to work for longer periods than satellites closer to home. The agency hailed it as a “critical step” in enabling “spacecraft to safely navigate themselves in deep space rather than rely on the time-consuming process of receiving directions from Earth”.

Atomic clocks, like those used in GPS satellites, can be used to measure the distance between two objects by timing how long it takes a signal to travel from point A to point B.

For space exploration, such clocks have to be extremely precise, as even a one second error could be mean the different between landing on a planet like Mars and missing it by several miles. This new atomic clock allegedly 50 times more stable than those on GPS satellites.

In controlled tests conducted on Earth, NASA said it lost one second per ten million years – now engineers will be able to test that accuracy in space, where the clock would be most useful, replacing the larger Earth-bound clocks currently used by navigators to pinpoint a spacecraft’s location.

It can take minutes to hours from a signal to be sent from Earth to the spacecraft before returning to Earth, where it can be used to create instructions that are then sent back to the spacecraft. An onboard clock would allow it to calculate its own trajectory, instead of waiting for navigators back on Earth, allowing missions to travel farther and – eventually – safely take humans to other planets.

“The goal of the space experiment is to put the Deep Space Atomic Clock in the context of an operating spacecraft – complete with the things that affect the stability and accuracy of a clock – and see if it performs at the level we think it will: with orders of magnitude more stability than existing space clocks,” Todd Ely, navigator and principal investigator of the project at the JPL, said in a statement.

The clock is hosted on a spacecraft provided by General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems of Englewood, Colorado, and sponsored by the Technology Demonstration Missions and Space Communications and Navigations programs. The JPL manages the project.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said on 21 August that it is seeking proposals for missions to explore lunar caves that could potentially accommodate human outposts, shielding astronauts from cosmic radiation and micrometeorites, and providing access to icy water and other resources trapped underground.

While the surface of the Moon has been well-documented by several satellite missions, we still know relatively little about the “presence and nature” of subsurface cavities. Planetary geologists have identified pits that could be related to the collapse of cavities such as lava tubes – where lava once flowed beneath the lunar surface.

The ESA is looking for ideas for missions with specific scientific objectives related to future explorations of lunar caves. Beyond the ability to access, navigate and map the caves, proposals could include communication lines between the caves and the outside world, and instruments to make scientifically relevant measurements of the cave environment.

Submissions that address one of more of these themes are encouraged:

• Robotic concepts for cave access along a vertical wall.
• Navigation and progression inside the cave on horizontal segments.
• Cave mapping and navigation.
• Communication/power network cave interior/lunar surface.
• Science payload.

The ESA expects to fund multiple small system studies as a result of this call for ideas with a maximum budget of €100 000 per activity and a maximum duration of six months.

All submissions will initially be evaluated on the novelty of the idea, its technical feasibility and quality, and the background and experience of the authors. Participants must be registered in one of the ESA’s Member States, Associate Member States or Cooperating States.

“Exploring and mapping these tubes could provide new information about the Moon’s geology, but they could also be an interesting option as long-term shelter for future human visitors to the Moon,” Franceso Sauro, Director of the ESA’s PANGAEA planetary geology astronaut training, said in statement.

“Mission concepts may be based on a single rover or a distributed system of satellite, robotic or rover systems that operate together,” Loredana Bessone, who is leading the hunt for ideas as Head of Analogue Field Testing and Exploration Training at the ESA, added. “Either way, we are looking for systems that would land on the lunar surface, identify and access a cave and contribute to the scientific exploration of the Moon.”

ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP) provides individuals and businesses with the opportunity to collaborate with ESA experts and contribute to the future of space research. It is run through Discovery & Preparation, which lays the groundwork for ESA’s short- to medium-term future activities.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on 27 September that is had selected fourteen American companies as  partners whose technologies will help enable the agency’s “Moon to Mars exploration approach”.

The selections are based on NASA’s fourth Tipping Point competition, and have a combined total award value of around US$43.2 million.

They address a multitude of areas, including cryogenic propellant production and management, sustainable energy generation, storage and distribution, efficient and affordable propulsion systems, autonomous operations, rover mobility, and advanced avionics.

“These promising technologies are at a ‘tipping point’ in their development, meaning NASA’s investment is likely the extra push a company needs to significantly mature a capability,” Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), said in a statement.

“These are important technologies necessary for sustained exploration of the Moon and Mars. As the agency focuses on landing astronauts on the Moon by 2024 with the Artemis program, we continue to prepare for the next phase of lunar exploration that feeds forward to Mars,” he added.

STMD will make milestone payments over a performance period of up to 36 months through firm-fixed price contracts. Each industry partner is required to contribute a minimum percent, based on the company’s size, of the total cost for each project.

The selected proposals, organized by technology area, are: 

Cryogenic Propellant Production and Management 

•   Blue Origin LLC of Kent, Washington, $10 million

A ground demonstration of hydrogen and oxygen liquefaction and storage, representing rocket and spacecraft propellant that could be produced on the Moon. The demonstration could help inform a large-scale propellant production plant suitable for the lunar surface.

•   OxEon Energy LLC of North Salt Lake, Utah, $1.8 million

OxEon Energy will work with the Colorado School of Mines to integrate an electrolysis technology to process ice and separate the hydrogen and oxygen. The molecules could then be cooled to produce fuel for cislunar transport. This technology could provide a flexible and scalable solution for future in-situ resource utilization operations on the Moon.

•   Skyre Inc. of East Hartford, Connecticut, $2.6 million

Skyre, also known as Sustainable Innovations, along with partner Meta Vista USA LLC, will develop a system to make propellant from permanently frozen water located at the Moon’s poles, including processes to separate the hydrogen and oxygen, keep the product extremely cold and use hydrogen as a refrigerant to liquefy oxygen.

•   SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $3 million

SpaceX will collaborate with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to develop and test coupler prototypes – or nozzles – for refueling spacecraft such as the company’s Starship vehicle. A cryogenic fluid coupler for large-scale in-space propellant transfer is an important technology to aid sustained exploration efforts on the Moon and Mars.

Sustainable Energy Generation, Storage and Distribution

•   Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Inc. of Windsor, Connecticut, $4 million

The company will collaborate with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to develop a scalable, modular and flexible power and energy product that utilizes new manufacturing methods to reduce cost and improve reliability. The technology could be used for lunar rovers, surface equipment and habitats.

•   Paragon Space Development Corporation of Houston, $2 million

Paragon Space Development Corporation will work with Johnson and NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland to develop an environmental control and life support system as well as a thermal control system for lunar missions that maintain acceptable operating temperatures throughout the Moon’s day and night cycle. The design of these systems could be adapted for crewed missions to Mars.

•   TallannQuest LLC of Sachse, Texas, $2 million

Working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the company, also known as Apogee Semiconductor, will develop a flexible, radiation-hardened switching power controller capable of being configured based on a mission’s power needs. This technology could be used for missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and other destinations.

Efficient and Affordable Propulsion Systems

•   Accion Systems Inc. of Boston, $3.9 million

The first interplanetary CubeSats, NASA’s MarCO-A and B, used a set of cold gas thrusters for attitude control and course corrections during their cruise to Mars, alongside the Mars InSight lander. Accion and JPL will partner to mature a propulsion system to demonstrate the same capabilities as those required for the MarCO mission, but with a smaller and lighter system that uses less power. The propulsion system could enable more science opportunities with these small, flexible platforms.

•   CU Aerospace LLC of Champaign, Illinois, $1.7 million

CU Aerospace, NearSpace Launch and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will build and test a 6-unit CubeSat equipped with two different propulsion systems. These systems were developed with NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding and offer high performance, low cost and safe pre-launch processing. The company plans to deliver the flight-ready CubeSat to NanoRacks for launch and deployment.

•   ExoTerra Resource LLC of Littleton, Colorado, $2 million

ExoTerra will build, test and launch a 12-unit CubeSat with a compact, high impulse solar electric propulsion module. Once flight-ready, the system will be demonstrated in-space as the CubeSat moves from low-Earth orbit to the radiation belts surrounding Earth. This small electric propulsion system could open up the inner solar system for targeted science exploration missions, using affordable spacecraft that range from 44 to 440 pounds.

Autonomous Operations

•   Blue Canyon Technologies Inc. of Boulder, Colorado, $4.9 million

As access to space increases, so does the need for ground resources, such as tracking stations. With an in-space demonstration, Blue Canyon Technologies will mature an autonomous navigation software solution for SmallSats and CubeSats so they can traverse space without “talking” to Earth.

Rover Mobility

•   Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, $2 million

Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon University will work with JPL and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to develop small rover “scouts” that can host payloads and interface with multiple large landers. This project received previous NASA funding through SBIR awards. The new partnership will develop more mature payload interfaces and increase rover capabilities.

Advanced Avionics

•   Intuitive Machines LLC of Houston, $1.3 million

Development of a spacecraft vision processing computer and software to reduce the cost and schedule required for deploying optical, or laser, navigation capabilities on government and commercial missions.

•   Luna Innovations of Blacksburg, Virginia, $2 million

Luna Innovations is partnering with Sierra Nevada Corporation, ILC Dover and Johnson to prove the viability of sensors that monitor the structural health and safety of inflatable space habitats located in orbit or on the surface of other worlds.

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a material that is ten times blacker than anything that has previously been reported, the university said on 12 September.

The material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscope filaments of carbon that the team grew on a surface of chlorine-etched aluminium foil, which captures around 99.995 percent of any incoming light – making it the blackest material on record.

“There are optical and space science applications for very black materials, and of course, artists have been interested in black, going back well before the Renaissance,” Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, said in a statement.

“I think the blackest black is a constantly moving target. Someone will find a blacker material, and eventually we’ll understand all the underlying mechanisms, and will be able to properly engineer the ultimate black,” he added.

The CNT material could have practical as well as artistic use (the engineers used it to create artwork in collaboration with Diemut Strebe, an artist-in-residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology), such as “optical blinders that reduce unwanted glare, to help space telescopes spot orbiting exoplanets”, Wardle said.

Wardle’s co-author on the paper – published the journal ACS-Applied Materials and Interfaces – is former MIT postdoc Kehang Cui, now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

They weren’t seeking to create an ultrablack material, but were instead experimenting with ways to grow carbon nanotubes on electrically conducting materials such as aluminium, to boost their electrical and thermal properties.

But while trying to grow CNTs on aluminium, Cui literally ran up against a barrier: an every-present layer of oxide that coats aluminium when it’s exposed to air. The oxide acts as an insulator to block, rather than conduct, electricity and heat.

Cui found that salt – or sodium chloride – could be used to remove the oxide layer. At the same time, Wardle’s group was using salt to grow carbon nanotubes, and in their tests with salt, Cui noticed that chloride ions were eating away at aluminum’s surface and dissolving its oxide layer.

“This etching process is common for many metals,” Cui said. “For instance, ships suffer from corrosion of chlorine-based ocean water. Now we’re using this process to our advantage.”

He found that soaking aluminium foil in saltwater allowed him to remove the oxide layer. Cui transferred the foil to an oxygen-free environment to prevent re-oxidation, then placed the etched aluminium in an oven, where the group used a process called chemical vapor deposition to grow carbon nanotubes.

By removing the oxide layer, the researchers were able to grow carbon nanotubes on aluminate at much lower temperatures than they otherwise would. They also saw that the CNTs significantly enhanced the material’s thermal and electrical properties – this was expected, but the colour of the material was not.

 “I remember noticing how black it was before growing carbon nanotubes on it, and then after growth, it looked even darker,” Cui said. “So I thought I should measure the optical reflectance of the sample.

“Our group does not usually focus on optical properties of materials, but this work was going on at the same time as our art-science collaborations with Diemut, so art influenced science in this case,” Wardle added.

Wardle and Cui, who have applied for a patent on the technology, are making the new CNT process freely available to any artist to use for a non-commercial art project.

According to MIT, the research are not entirely sure what processes made the material quite so black, but they suspect that it has something to do with the combination of etched aluminium – which is somewhat blackened already – with the carbon nanotubes.

Scientists believe that forests of carbon nanotubes can trap and convert most incoming light to heat, reflecting very little of it back out as light, thereby giving CNTs a particularly black shade.

“CNT forests of different varieties are known to be extremely black, but there is a lack of mechanistic understanding as to why this material is the blackest. That needs further study,” Wardle said.

The material is already gaining interest in the aerospace community. Astrophysicist and Nobel laureate John Mather, who was not involved in the research, is exploring the possibility of using Wardle’s material as the basis for a star shade — a massive black shade that would shield a space telescope from stray light.

“Optical instruments like cameras and telescopes have to get rid of unwanted glare, so you can see what you want to see,” Mather commented. “Would you like to see an Earth orbiting another star? We need something very black. … And this black has to be tough to withstand a rocket launch. Old versions were fragile forests of fur, but these are more like pot scrubbers — built to take abuse.”

In what the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) described as a “major milestone”, engineers have successfully connected the two halves of the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California.

The agency said on 28 August that the engineers “carefully lifted the Webb telescope (which includes the mirrors and science instruments) above the already-combined sunshield and spacecraft using a crane”.

The team “slowly guided the telescope into place, ensuring that all primary points of contact were perfectly aligned and seated properly”. Now that the observatory has been mechanically connected, the next steps will be to electrically connect the two halves and test the connections.

The next part of the test for the Webb project will be for the engineers to “ fully deploy the intricate five-layer sunshield, which is designed to keep Webb’s mirrors and scientific instruments cold by blocking infrared light from the Earth, Moon and Sun”.

The ability of the sunshield to deploy to its correct shape will be critical to the success of the mission, the agency said. Both of the telescope’s major components have been individually tested in all of the environments they could encounter during a rocket ride and orbiting mission a million miles away from the Earth.

The fully assembled observatory will now go through additional environmental and deployment testing with a scheduled launch date in 2021. Webb is an international project led by NASA with its partners, European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a large, space-based observatory, optimized for infrared wavelengths, which will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA intends for the telescope to cover longer wavelengths of light than Hubble and to have greatly improved sensitivity. The longer wavelengths should let it “look further back in time to see the first galaxies that formed in the early universe, and to peer inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today”.

The construction of the telescope has been marred by delays and cost overruns that have pushed the launch date from 2018 to 2021.

The JWST is named after James E. Webb, NASA’s second administrator. Webb is best known for leading Apollo, a series of lunar exploration programs that landed the first humans on the Moon. He also initiated a vigorous space science program that was responsible for over 75 launches during his tenure, including America’s first interplanetary explorers.

 “The assembly of the telescope and its scientific instruments, sunshield and the spacecraft into one observatory represents an incredible achievement by the entire Webb team,” Bill Ochs, Webb project manager for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. 

“This milestone symbolizes the efforts of thousands of dedicated individuals for over more than 20 years across NASA, the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, Northrop Grumman, and the rest of our industrial and academic partners,” he added.

“This is an exciting time to now see all Webb’s parts finally joined together into a single observatory for the very first time,” Gregory Robinson, the Webb program director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, said. “The engineering team has accomplished a huge step forward and soon we will be able to see incredible new views of our amazing universe.”

The European Space Agency (ESA) said on 27 August that it had completed construction of the Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover in the UK, before it headed to an Airbus facility in Toulouse, France, for four months of testing to confirm it is compatible with the mission operations and the Martian environment.

Engineers at the Airbus Defence and Space site in Stevenage, England, attached the final pieces of the rover’s scientific suite of instruments, including the rover’s “eyes”: a set of high-resolution cameras that will allow it to guide itself on Mars via panoramic and close-up images of the terrain.

The rover will “seek out interesting geological locations to examine with its scientific tools and to drill to retrieve underground samples, on a quest” to determine if there has ever been life on Mars, and to better understand the history of water on the planet, the ESA said.

It was assembled in a sterile cleanroom under stringent cleanliness rules to avoid that organics, including traces of human life, are accidentally carried to Mars and contaminate the samples. The next round of tests will be conducted using vibration benches, in a chamber that simulates the range of environmental conditions scientists expect it to face on the so-called red planet.

The rover’s instruments will need to be able to work in environment that is much harsher than we experience on Earth. For example, it can expect temperatures as low as -120°C outside, and –60°C inside the rover.

The composite spacecraft comprising the carrier module, descent module, surface science platform and a replica rover will simultaneously undergo environmental testing to confirm it is ready to endure the environment of space on its eight-month journey to Mars.

Last year the ‘structural and thermal model’ of the rover successfully completed a rigorous environmental test campaign. However, the parachute system that will slow down the rover’s descent is reportedly still not yet up to scratch.

Earlier this year, the analytical laboratory that will process and analyse the drilled samples inside the rover also completed a series of tests to verify that the mechanisms and instruments during science operations can produce satisfactory results under challenging conditions.

The mission is currently expected to launch in just under a year from now – within a launch window between 26 July and 13 August 2020 – on a Russia Proton-M launcher and to arrive at Mars in March 2021.

“Completing the build of the Rosalind Franklin rover under the strict cleanliness requirements, with all the science instruments onboard, is a major milestone of our ExoMars programme,” David Parker, the ESA’s Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, said in a statement. “It is thanks to the dedication of all the teams involved that we are able to celebrate this moment today.”

“We’re looking forward to completing the final rounds of tests before the rover is declared flight ready and closed inside the landing platform and descent module that will deliver it safely to the surface of Mars,” he added.

In addition to the 2020 mission, the ExoMars programme also includes the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) launched in 2016. The TGO is already both delivering scientific results of its own and relaying data from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and Insight lander, and will relay the data from the ExoMars 2020 mission once it arrives at Mars.