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A Song of Iceland Fire: Scotland’s Skyrora launches Skylark Micro rocket from volcanic viking outpost
Interview Edinburgh-based Skyrora launched its two-stage Skylark Micro rocket from Iceland over the weekend. The Register spoke to business operations manager Derek Harris about the mission and what comes next.
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Good news: NASA boffins spot closest near-Earth asteroid ever. Bad news: We never saw it coming. Good news: It’s also really small
A space rock the size of a sports utility vehicle zoomed within 2,950km of Earth over the weekend.
It’s good news because, as NASA explained, the 15 August flyby of 2020 QG was the closest pass humanity has ever detected and therefore speaks to our enormous cleverness.
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MediaTek pings Italy with ‘5G’ Internet-of-Things data beam from geostationary satellite 35,000 kilometres up
MediaTek has successfully demonstrated a “5G” data transfer using an Inmarsat Alphasat geostationary satellite, located 35,000 kilometres above the equator.
At the other end of the exchange was a MediaTek base station system located at Italy’s Fucino Space Center. The ground equipment used a platform powered by the Taiwanese fabless manufacturer’s NB-IoT chipset.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will attempt to find and patch the source of a tiny air leak first detected last year.
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Tired: Cheap space launch outfits. Wired: Software-and-data-as-a-service for cheap space launch outfits
Ventures that plan to get stuff into space at low prices are not hard to find. But service providers for those cut-price launchers are a new to El Reg .
Hence our interest in Japanese space upstart iSpace, which yesterday decided to start a new line of business offering a “data-centric platform through which the company aims to support customers with lunar market entry.”:
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Pew, pew, pew! Our galaxy is shooting cold, gaseous ‘bullets’ of high-speed matter. Boffins are baffled
The Milky Way is shooting blobs of never-before-seen cold, dense gas from its center – and astronomers have no idea how or why, according to a paper published in Nature.
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As an avid fan of The Lord of the Rings, I’m always amused when I see “boffin” used to refer to scientists. Makes me think of a bunch of hobbits in lab coats, smoking pipeweed, scrawling equations on blackboards, and snacking on pies. 
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Teaser!
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Crack this mystery: Something rotated the ice shell around Jupiter’s Europa millions of years ago, fracturing it
A new study of the ice shell encrusting Europa, Jupiter’s sixth-closest moon, suggests it is free-floating and shifted 70 degrees after a major geologic event rotated the surface several millions of years ago.
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UK boffins have used smarts gained through the development of fusion technology to fire up a thruster with the purpose of eventually cutting interplanetary travel times.
The UK-based Pulsar Fusion team showed off the thruster last month, a slightly alarming ring of plasma burning at millions of degrees in a vacuum chamber, confined by an electromagnetic field and spewing out particles at speeds of over 20km/s.
Brit uni’s AI algorithm clocks 50 exoplanets hidden in Kepler space 'scope archives
A machine-learning algorithm has sniffed out 50 highly likely exoplanets previously hidden in data collected by NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope.
The system uses a gaussian process classifier that crunches through a list of possible planet candidates, and assigns a percentage describing how likely each object is an alien world.
What would you prefer: Satellite-streamed cat GIFs – or a decent early warning of an asteroid apocalypse?
Swarms of small communications satellites saturating space may make it more difficult to observe and track potentially hazardous asteroids zooming toward Earth, astronomers have warned.
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I mean… why the fuck is that even a question? 
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Because humans are really good at figuring out what’s in their best interest, and always choose careful long-term planning for sensible goals over instant gratification?
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Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it’s quite possibly already happening
Andromeda sports a ginormous halo of gas with a mass greater than 100 billion Suns that stretches from its outer edges up to two million light-years – a distance that reaches more than halfway to our own Milky Way galaxy.
If the structure was visible to the naked eye, it would appear three times the width of the Big Dipper, said NASA, and be the largest cosmic framework in our night sky. The gas is made up of plasma and a large sprinkling of stardust shed from dead suns and supernovae. It’s split into two layers: the inner shell is lumpier and more dynamic, the outer shell is smoother and hotter.
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