NASA launches IMAP mission to provide real-time space weather forecasts

24 Sep 2025 Michael Banks

Cosmic mapper The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe will spend two years studying the solar wind and its interaction with the interstellar medium. (Courtesy: NASA)

NASA has launched a two-year mission to study the boundary of the heliosphere, a huge protective bubble in space created by the Sun. The Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) took off today aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The mission is now on a four-month journey to Lagrange point 1 (L1) – a point in space about 1.6 million kilometres from the Earth towards the Sun.

The solar wind is a stream of charged particles emitted by the Sun into space that helps to form the heliosphere. IMAP will study the solar wind and its interaction with the interstellar medium to better understand the heliosphere and its boundaries, which begin about 14 billion kilometres from Earth. This boundary offers protection from harsh radiation from space and is key to creating and maintaining a habitable solar system.

 

China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft return delayed by space debris impact

07 Nov 2025 Michael Banks

Space delay: The crewed Shenzhou-20 spacecraft was launched on 24 April for a six-month mission to China’s Tiangong space station. (Courtesy: China Manned Space Agency)

China has delayed the return of a crewed mission to the country’s space station over fears that the astronaut’s spacecraft has been struck by space debris. The craft was supposed to return to Earth on 5 November, but the China Manned Space Agency says it will now carry out an impact analysis and risk assessment before making any further decisions about when the astronauts will return.

The Shenzhou programme involves taking astronauts to and from China’s Tiangong space station, which was constructed in 2022, for six-month stays.

 

SEMICON Europa 2025 presents cutting-edge technology for semiconductor R&D and production

12 Nov 2025 Sponsored by SEMICON Europa 2025 exhibitors

Europe’s largest event for electronics manufacturing comes to Munich on 18−21 November, 2025. Here are some of the companies and product innovations to look out for on the exhibition floor

Europe’s finest SEMICON Europa 2025 will showcase the continent’s semiconductor prowess. (Courtesy: iStock/Alexander Sikov)

“Global collaborations for European economic resilience” is the theme of SEMICON Europa 2025. The event is taking place in Munich, Germany, from 18 to 21 November, and it will attract 25,000 semiconductor professionals who will enjoy presentations from over 200 speakers.

The TechARENA portion of the event will cover a wide range of technology-related issues, including new materials, future computing paradigms, and the development of hi-tech skills in the European workforce. There will also be an Executive Forum, featuring leaders from industry and government, which will cover topics including silicon geopolitics and the application of artificial intelligence in semiconductor manufacturing.

 

Ten-ion system brings us a step closer to large-scale qubit registers

17 Nov 2025 Nohora Hernández 

Team effort. Based at the University of Innsbruck, Ben Lanyon’s group has created a novel qubit register by trapping ten ions. (Courtesy: Victor Krutyanskiy/University of Innsbruck)

Researchers in Austria have entangled matter-based qubits with photonic qubits in a ten-ion system. The technique is scalable to larger ion-qubit registers, paving the way for the creation of larger and more complex quantum networks.Ions in motion. Each ion (large object) is moved one at a time into the “sweet spot” of the optical cavity. Once there, a laser beam drives the emission of a single photon (a small object) that is entangled with the ion. The colours indicate ion–photon entanglement. (Courtesy: Universität Innsbruck/Harald Ritsch)

 

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center hit by significant downsizing

13 Nov 2025

Under threat: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has closed a third of its buildings since September. (Courtesy: NASA)

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) appears poised to lose a significant portion of its budget as a two-decade reorganization plan for the center is being accelerated. The move, which is set to be complete by March, has left the Goddard campus with empty buildings and disillusioned employees. Some staff even fear that the actions taken during the 43-day US government shutdown, which ended on 12 November, could result in the end of much of the centre’s activities.

Based in Greenbelt, Maryland, the GSFC has almost 10,000 scientists and engineers, about 7000 of whom are directly employed by NASA contractors.

 

Designing better semiconductor chips: NP hard problems and forever chemicals

13 Nov 2025 Margaret Harris

Like any major endeavour, designing and fabricating semiconductor chips requires compromise. In addition to trade-offs between cost and performance, designers also consider carbon emissions and other environmental impacts.

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, Margaret Harris reports from the Heidelberg Laureate Forum where she spoke to two researchers who are focused on some of these design challenges.

 

Classical gravity may entangle matter, new study claims

11 Nov 2025

Inducing entanglement Can classical gravity entangle particles? (Courtesy: iStock/Denis Pobytov)

Gravity might be able to quantum-entangle particles even if the gravitational field itself is classical. That is the conclusion of a new study by Joseph Aziz and Richard Howl at Royal Holloway University of London. This challenges a popular view that such entanglement would necessarily imply that gravity must be quantized. This could be crucial in the ongoing effort to develop a theory of quantum gravity that unifies quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

“When you try to quantize the gravitational interaction in exactly the same way we tried to mathematically quantize the other forces, you end up with mathematically inconsistent results – you end up with infinities in your calculations that you can’t do anything about,” Howl tells Physics World.

 

• Superconductivity
 
• Research update

Ternary hydride shows signs of room-temperature superconductivity at high pressures

07 Nov 2025 Isabelle Dumé

Crystal structure In the new high-Tc superconductor, lanthanum and scandium atoms constitute the MgB2-type sublattice, while the surrounding hydrogen atoms form two types of cage-like configurations. (Courtesy: Guangtao Liu, Jilin University)

Researchers in China claim to have made the first ever room-temperature superconductor by compressing an alloy of lanthanum-scandium (La-Sc) and the hydrogen-rich material ammonia borane (NH3BH3) together at pressures of 250–260 GPa, observing superconductivity with a maximum onset temperature of 298 K. While these high pressures are akin to those at the centre of the Earth, the work marks a milestone in the field of superconductivity, they say.

Superconductors conduct electricity without resistance, and many materials do this when cooled below a certain transition temperature, Tc. In most cases, this temperature is very low – for example, solid mercury, the first superconductor to be discovered, has a Tc of 4.2 K.