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Europe’s Columbus laboratory is a hive of activity in this 360° timelapse as ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer works on an experiment called Fluidics and his NASA colleague Raja Chari carries out activity in the Veggie plant habitat.

Developed by French space agency CNES and co-funded by Airbus, the Fluidics experiment investigates how liquids behave in space. It was first run by ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet in 2017 during his Proxima mission.

Made up of six small, transparent spheres housed in the black centrifuge seen here, the experiment studies two phenomena. The first is ‘sloshing’ or how liquids move in

Boston MA (SPX) Feb 25, 2022
Research scientist Alex Tinguely is readjusting to Cambridge and Boston. As a postdoc with the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), the MIT graduate spent the last two years in Oxford, England, a city he recalls can be traversed entirely "in the time it takes to walk from MIT to Harvard." With its ancient stone walls, cathedrals, cobblestone streets, and winding paths, that small city

Nanjing, China (SPX) Feb 24, 2022
As the main freshwater resource on Earth's surface, lakes play an important role in maintaining ecosystem stability and the sustainable development of human society. However, it's been difficult to evaluate changes in global lake-water volume across space and time due to data problems. Specifically, ground-monitoring data have not been sufficiently representative of all lakes, and traditio

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Feb 24, 2022
The part of the atmosphere closest to the planet is the hardest to measure from space due to the volume of gases above it. Studying Earth's planetary boundary layer, or PBL, will enable scientists to better understand the interaction between Earth's surface and weather and how that evolves in a global, changing climate. "The planetary boundary layer is where we live and where we experience

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 24, 2022
Through a new prize competition, NASA is engaging minority serving institutions (MSIs) to bring ideas for new information technologies that will help address climate change. The prize competition, the MSI Space Accelerator, comes from a new partnership between NASA's Science Mission Directorate, the Minority University Research Education Project within the Office of STEM Engagement, NASA's Jet P

Edwards AFB CA (SPX) Feb 23, 2022
During the global pandemic people have realized remote healthcare, delivery, and easy access to services are paramount. NASA's Advanced Air Mobility or AAM mission paves the way toward enabling significant air mobility needs such as better access to healthcare services. AAM has the potential to provide medical transport for people and supplies around the world. This could be a highly autom

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Feb 28, 2022
Scientists developed a neural network deep learning technique to extract hidden turbulent motion information from observations of the Sun. Tests on three different sets of simulation data showed that it is possible to infer the horizontal motion from data for the temperature and vertical motion. This technique will benefit solar astronomy and other fields such as plasma physics, fusion science,

Baltimore MD (SPX) Feb 28, 2022
Webb continues on its path to becoming a focused observatory. The team has successfully worked through the second and third out of seven total phases of mirror alignment. With the completion of these phases, called Segment Alignment and Image Stacking, the team will now begin making smaller adjustments to the positions of Webb's mirrors. After moving what were 18 scattered dots of starligh

Hefei, China (SPX) Feb 28, 2022
Dr. HE Zhicheng and his coworkers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences created a new way to measure the physical properties of galactic ionized gas, and discovered the acceleration of quasar outflows at the scale of tens of parsecs for the first time. Their paper was published on Science Advances According to modern theories on ga

Durham UK (SPX) Feb 28, 2022
Durham University astronomer collaborating with a team of international scientists have mapped more than a quarter of the northern sky using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), a pan-European radio telescope. The map reveals an astonishingly detailed radio image of more than 4.4 million objects and a very dynamic picture of our Universe, which now has been made public for the first time.