orbit
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to put data centres in SPACE - but experts warn they could be 'catastrophic' for the planet
House of Horrors mom insists her kids were NOT'feral', as lawyer reveals her incredulous excuse for their'messy' home Bargain hunter bought Connecticut mansion for a pittance only to find family decomposing inside. Why Tom Brady's midlife crisis after Gisele Bundchen divorce threatens to ruin his legacy... and he doesn't care! Jon Bon Jovi, 64, abruptly stops NYC concert and tells audience he is'hurt' before leaving the stage So much has never been made public': Insiders at very top of Hollywood tell me bombshell twist that flips Taylor Swift-Lively feud on its head: ROB SHUTER McDonald's copies Costco with its newest menu item and fans have mixed reactions Meghan and Harry share snaps of their European summer holiday as pro-Sussex People magazine reveals they stayed at Princess Diana's childhood home with Archie and Lilibet The age when you must give up smoking to escape the risk of lung cancer: Experts reveal the truth about what quitting does to your body in your 30s, 40s, and 50s... and the REAL impact of that one cheeky cigarette a week White House defends Sophie Cunningham amid woke backlash... as WNBA star doubles down on trans views with new Instagram photos Hot summer snaps of Nicole Kidman getting affectionate with handsome businessman on Italian getaway... as friends speak out about moving on after Keith Urban divorce Amal Clooney's diet and fitness regime revealed - and it's surprisingly simple if you don't mind seaweed soup for breakfast! Harry has reached a new low. It's such a slap in the face to his father... especially after what the King's friend told me: RICHARD EDEN Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to put data centres in SPACE - but experts warn they could be'catastrophic' for the planet Data centres in space could be'catastrophic' for the planet, scientsts have warned in response to plans laid out by some of the world's richest people.
'Super weird' object may be space's first confirmed exomoon
Science Space Deep Space Exoplanets'Super weird' object may be space's first confirmed exomoon The object about 72 light-years away from Earth could be the first satellite discovered outside our solar system. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. This illustration shows the system around the star CD-35 2722, with the newly found moon-like object at the center. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .
India achieves milestone with launch of first private-sector orbital rocket
India has successfully tested its first private-sector orbital rocket, marking a milestone in New Delhi's ambition to become a major player in the global space economy. The three-stage 22-metre Vikram-1 was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota and deployed customer payloads into a 450km (280-mile) low-Earth orbit, making India the third country to achieve orbital launch capability through private enterprise. It also carried experimental equipment, a lab-grown diamond and a miniature 18-carat gold sculpture commemorating India's national space programme. India Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the achievement, saying that it will "encourage countless youngsters to dream bigger and innovate fearlessly". Founded in 2018, Skyroot is among a new generation of Indian space startups that have attracted backing from global investors following the sector's liberalisation.
British Space Startup Launches Longevity Lab Into Orbit
The lab will beam back data to train AI models to predict how proteins behind age-related diseases like Alzheimer's and certain cancers behave. Space is becoming the next frontier in longevity research. A British startup just launched self-run chemical experiments into orbit, in the hopes zero-gravity data might shine a light on a group of disease-causing proteins too difficult to study on Earth. But first they need to check their autonomous laboratory will work in space. Mass Balance's grapefruit-sized apparatus containing chemicals, sensors and control elements to keep the chemicals functioning launched on a SpaceX transporter on Tuesday morning.
NASA mission to rescue the falling Swift observatory has launched
A robotic spacecraft called LINK will soon tug the telescope to a higher orbit. The NASA Swift Boost mission has launched from Marshall Islands on July 3 at 4:36AM Eastern time after a couple of delays, and the agency has started preparing it for its ultimate goal: To rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which is falling faster than anticipated. Swift Boost's ground teams have already established communication with LINK, the robotic spacecraft designed by Arizona company Katalyst Space to dock with the observatory and to tug it back into a higher orbit. LINK was attached to a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket, which was in turn attached to the belly of a plane called Stargazer. The plane took off from Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands and then released the Pegasus XL rocket in the air at an altitude of around 40,000.
Nasa launches mission to save falling space telescope
Image caption, Artist's impression of the Swift observatory which was built to study the cosmos A Nasa-funded spacecraft has been sent into space to catch a falling telescope. The Swift observatory detects some of the most powerful explosions in the Universe - but is at risk of crashing back to Earth in the coming months. The small space telescope will be intercepted by the LINK craft, which will attempt to grab it with three robotic arms, and try and lift it back to a safe orbit. The rescue mission, launched on Friday, has never been attempted before, and Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist, has said it is high risk. But Nasa obviously thinks it's worth a go.
Dead-Direction Conditioners: Gauge-Equivariant Preconditioning for Deep Networks
A deep network's loss is invariant to continuous symmetries of its parameters: the logit shift, the ReLU rescaling, the LayerNorm scale, the per-head attention rotation. Adam's per-coordinate preconditioner drifts along each symmetry orbit, which pulls the trajectory off the symmetry quotient where the optimization lives and blurs the singular-learning rate the quotient makes readable. We build DDC, a Dead-Direction Conditioner that lifts a base optimizer into a $G$-equivariant one: it conditions the optimizer's state in the orbit decomposition of a $G$-invariant metric, so the trajectory stays a preconditioned gradient flow on the quotient $\barΘ= Θ/G$. The construction carries four architectural gauges (cross-entropy shift, ReLU and SwiGLU rescaling, LayerNorm and RMSNorm scale, and a per-head $O(d_{\rm head})$ attention rotation matched to RoPE), proves exactly equivariant on an Adam base, and composes with a Muon base through a gauge-equivariant orthogonaliser. Respecting the symmetry changes both the minimum the optimizer reaches and what it leaves measurable there. On a language model trained past the point of fit, DDCAdam resists the over-training collapse AdamW falls into, holding a validation-train loss gap of 0.67 against 5.88, and reads the dead-direction rate in 32 of 65 layer-by-observable cells where AdamW reads it in 7. A vision transformer trained from scratch reaches lower validation loss (1.71 against 2.12) while compressing spare feed-forward capacity a matched AdamW leaves intact. On a Muon base, where the rotation gauge composes exactly, DDCMuon groks ten of eleven seeds at depth 24 that a plain Muon never reaches. Built into the optimizer, a network's gauge symmetry sharpens the minimum it finds and turns that minimum's geometry into something the trajectory can measure.
OrbitZoo: Real Orbital Systems Challenges for Reinforcement Learning
The increasing number of satellites and orbital debris has made space congestion a critical issue, threatening satellite safety and sustainability. Challenges such as collision avoidance, station-keeping, and orbital maneuvering require advanced techniques to handle dynamic uncertainties and multi-agent interactions. Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in this domain, enabling adaptive, autonomous policies for space operations; however, many existing RL frameworks rely on custom-built environments developed from scratch, which often use simplified models and require significant time to implement and validate the orbital dynamics, limiting their ability to fully capture real-world complexities. To address this, we introduce OrbitZoo, a versatile multi-agent RL environment built on a highfidelity industry standard library, that enables realistic data generation, supports scenarios like collision avoidance and cooperative maneuvers, and ensures robust and accurate orbital dynamics. The environment is validated against various real satellite constellations, including Starlink, achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 0.16% compared to real-world data. This validation ensures reliability for generating high-fidelity simulations and enabling autonomous and independent satellite operations. This project is open source1 and has a dedicated project page2.