Government

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) cooperates with the Philippines Space Agency on the peaceful use of outer space, the agency announced. UNOOSA said it signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Philippines Space Agency (PhilSA) to deliver joint capacity-building activities

New Zealand is the 11th nation to sign NASA’s Artemis Accords, the country announced. New Zealand’s foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta and the economic development minister Stuart Nash announced the government has agreed to join the Artemis Accords, launched by NASA, and now signed by eleven nations, the government said on its website. 

The European Space Agency (ESA) partners with the British Arqit – a leader in the quantum encryption field – to develop its quantum key distribution satellite QKDSat, the agency said. ArQit recently announced that it was merging with Centricus, a global investment firm, in a transaction expected to provide Arqit with up to €330 million in gross proceeds.

The European Court of Justice rejected a request by OHB System to suspend a decision by the European Space Agency (ESA) to exclude the German satellite company from a Galileo public contract, which went to its rivals Airbus and Thales Alenia Space, Reuters and other newswires reported. The court also dismissed OHB's application for interim relief, the reports said.

The European commissioner for internal market, Thierry Breton, does not see Eutelsat involved in the European broadband satellite constellation due to its investment in OneWeb, the FT reports. “I do not see how, structurally, an entity can have stakes in two competing projects,” the FT quotes Breton.

NASA is planning to send its robot rover Viper to the Moon in late 2023, the agency said, to search for ice and other resources on and below the lunar surface. The Viper data would help the agency map resources at the lunar South Pole that could one day be harvested for long-term human exploration at the Moon, NASA said. 

As the EU aspires to lead climate mitigation in the face of global warming, it is critical that action be informed by reliable and accurate data. Thanks to unprecedented technological innovations, data now allows decision-makers to identify risks, tailor policy response and resource allocation, monitor progress and identify trends.

He did not welcome the uncontrolled return of China’s Long March launcher pieces for its Mars mission, but he congratulated China for the release of its first photos from the Zhurong Mars rover. “Congratulations to the China National Space Administration on receiving the first images from the Zhurong Mars rover,” the new NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.

A historic step: China landed a rover on Mars on Saturday, making it the second space-faring nation after the United States to land on the Red Planet, China’s state media and the worldwide media reported. The uncrewed Tianwen-1 spacecraft landed on a vast plain known as Utopia Planitia.

by Maija Lönnqvist, You may know Finland from its stable society, digitalization, innovativeness, even from being the world’s happiest nation, but did you know that Finland is also a rising star in space activities? Recent years have seen the first Finnish satellites, revision of the national space strategy