By Peter Lord (Maxar), David Oh (JPL), and Steven Scott (Maxar) as told to Danya Gainor

As the Psyche spacecraft transitions into its ATLO (assembly, test, launch, and operations) phase, the recent arrival of the solar electric propulsion (SEP) chassis to JPL brings to mind a novel (and somewhat radical) choice we made early on to have a commercial company, Maxar Technologies, build the SEP chassis, but have JPL build the main computer and software that control the spacecraft. The choice of spa

PHOENIX – A Phoenix educator, entrepreneur, adventurer and science communicator has been selected for the crew of Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first all-civilian mission to space.

Sian Proctor, who’s a geology, sustainability and planetary science professor at South Mountain Community College, was one of the two final crew members SpaceX announced Tuesday at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where SpaceX Dragon will launch in the fall.

Proctor, who will pilot the craft, was selected from thousands of

PHOENIX – A team led by University of Arizona astronomers has discovered the most distant quasar found to date. Researchers hope the quasar, which is more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, will provide answers to how galaxies formed after the big bang.

“It was a relief to find,” said Feige Wang, lead author of the quasar’s research paper and Hubble Fellow at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. “We have been searching for this quasar for almost five years. We knew it was there