Russia will stay in ISS program at least until 2028: report

Russia’s departure from the International Space Station (ISS) program isn’t exactly imminent, it would seem. On Tuesday (July 26), Yuri Borisov, the new head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, announced that the nation planned to leave the ISS consortium “after 2024.”  That statement contains quite a bit of wiggle room, and it appears that Russia is going to take advantage of it. The nation intends to remain an ISS partner at least until its own space station is up and running, a milestone that’s not expected until 2028 at the…

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US Postal Service to launch James Webb Space Telescope ‘forever’ stamp

 The United States Postal Service (USPS) is celebrating NASA’s revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with a new “Forever” stamp. The new James Webb Space Telescope Forever stamps will be available for preorder on Aug. 8 through the USPS’s online stamp store, and will open for general sale on Sept. 8.  The stamp commemorates the start of the telescope’s science mission and depicts the James Webb Space Telescope‘s iconic golden honeycomb mirror and its large sunshields in space as  Earth and the moon can be seen in the distance behind…

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‘Castaway’ gamma-ray bursts come from distant early galaxies

Isolated mysterious blasts of intense energy that previously couldn’t be traced back to galactic sources could originate from incredibly dim galaxies located as far away as 10 billion light-years. An international team of astronomers used some of the most powerful ground and space-based telescopes  —  including the Gemini North telescope in Hawai’i and the Gemini South telescope in Chile  —  to trace the origins of these “castaway” short gamma-ray bursts to incredibly distant galaxies. “Many short gamma-ray bursts are found in bright galaxies relatively close to us, but some of…

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