Science News Roundup: Some dinosaurs had exquisite eggs; Airbus delivers powerhouse for NASA's Orion spacecraft

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

Russian Soyuz rocket failure caused by a damaged sensor: investigation

The abortive launch last month of a manned Soyuz mission to space was caused by a sensor damaged during the rocket's assembly at the cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Russian investigators said on Thursday. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to scrap their mission on Oct. 11 after a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS) failed, sending them plunging back to Earth in an emergency landing.

Some dinosaurs had exquisite eggs with colours, spots, speckles

Some dinosaurs laid coloured, speckled and spotted eggs boasting exquisite hues of blue and brown, scientists said on Thursday, in a discovery that scrambles the notion that such exceptional traits originated with birds. An analysis of 12 fossilized dinosaur eggshells from Europe, Asia, North America and South America detected the same two pigments present in colorful birds eggs in a dinosaur group called eumaniraptorans, which includes well-known meat eaters like Velociraptor and the small feathered dinosaur ancestors of birds.

Stephen Hawking's thesis, wheelchair heading for auction

From a copy of his PhD thesis to his wheelchair, items belonging to Stephen Hawking are headed for auction, offering fans of the late British physicist famed for his work exploring the origins of the universe a chance to buy some of his possessions. Known for his acclaimed research on black holes, the wheelchair-bound Hawking, who suffered from motor neurone disease and used an electronic voice synthesizer, died in March at the age of 76.

To the Moon and beyond: Airbus delivers powerhouse for NASA's Orion spacecraft

Europe's Airbus on Friday delivered the "powerhouse" for NASA's new Orion Spaceship that will take astronauts to the Moon and beyond in coming years, hitting a key milestone that should lead to hundreds of millions of euros in future orders. Engineers at the Airbus plant in Bremen, Germany on Thursday carefully packed the spacecraft into a special container that will fly aboard a huge Antonov cargo plane to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first step on its way to deep space.

Musk shakes up SpaceX in race to make satellite launch window: sources

SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company's growth. Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven people on the program's senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites, according to two SpaceX employees with direct knowledge of the situation.

Scientists launch plan to map genes of all complex life on earth

Scientists launched a vast project on Thursday to map the genetic code of all 1.5 million known species of complex life on earth, aiming to complete the work within a decade. They described the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) as "the next moonshot for biology" after the Human Genome Project, a 13-year $3 billion endeavour to map human DNA which was completed in 2003.

NASA retires its planet hunter, the Kepler space telescope

The Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and will be retired after a 9-1/2-year mission in which it detected thousands of planets beyond our solar system and boosted the search for worlds that might harbour alien life, NASA said on Tuesday. Currently orbiting the sun 94 million miles (156 million km) from Earth, the spacecraft will drift further from our planet when mission engineers turn off its radio transmitters, the U.S. space agency said.

(With inputs from agencies.)