...the who's who,
and the what's what 
of the space industry

Copernical Team

Copernical Team

Remote surgery robot to be tested aboard International Space Station
Nebraska Engineering Professor Shane Farritor invented 'MIRA,' a miniaturized robot for remote surgery. Credit: University Communication, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

A miniaturized robot invented by Nebraska Engineering Professor Shane Farritor may soon blast into space to test its skills.

NASA recently awarded the University of Nebraska-Lincoln $100,000 through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) at the University of Nebraska Omaha to ready the for a 2024 test mission aboard the International Space Station.

"NASA has been a long-term supporter of this research and, as a culmination of that effort, our will have a chance to fly on the International Space Station," Farritor said.

Farritor is co-founder of Virtual Incision, a based on Nebraska Innovation Campus. For nearly 20 years, he and his colleagues have been developing the tiny surgical robot known as MIRA, short for "miniaturized in vivo robotic assistant.

Tuesday, 02 August 2022 11:32

Utah's Great Salt Lake is disappearing

Paris (ESA) Aug 02, 2022
Utah's Great Salt Lake dropped to its lowest recorded water level last month as a megadrought persists across the US southwest, forcing the fast-growing city to curb its water use. From space, satellite images show how water levels have fallen from 1985 to 2022 - exposing large expanses of lakebed. According to data from the US Geological Survey, the Great Salt Lake's surface water elevati
Paris, France (SPX) Aug 02, 2022
Every year, the Airbus Foundation delivers satellite imagery covering tens of thousands of square kilometres around the globe to support its partners involved in humanitarian aid and protecting the environment. As the number of requests continues to grow, the Foundation has significantly extended the range of products and services offered - including new types of imagery, photo interpretation an
Pasadena CA (JPL) Aug 02, 2022
For this 3-sol weekend plan, I worked as the Tactical Uplink Lead. This morning we came in to discover that the drive had stopped early due to high slip on the steep terrain, and our parking place was not a safe spot to unstow and use the arm. So we quickly switched gears and loaded up the plan with lots of remote science. This terrain is particularly beautiful, so the opportunity to take
Blacksburg VA (SPX) Aug 02, 2022
For a long time, our view of Ceres was fuzzy, said Scott King, a geoscientist in the Virginia Tech College of Science. A dwarf planet and the largest body found in the asteroid belt - the region between Jupiter and Mars speckled with hundreds of thousands of asteroids - Ceres had no distinguishable surface features in existing telescopic observations from Earth. Then, in 2015, the hazy orb
Swindon UK (SPX) Aug 02, 2022
ViaLite's Hyper Wide Dynamic Range (HWDR) links are providing enhanced performance at a teleport operations center in Kourou in South America. The L-Band HTS - HWDR links are being used to transfer high-speed data in LEOP (Launch and Early Orbit Phase) operations. The industry leading links support frequencies between 400-2500 MHz while offering a Spurious-Free Dynamic Range (SFDR) of up t
Huntsville AL (SPX) Aug 02, 2022
Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) has been awarded an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with a maximum amount of $3,286,745,005 by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) Weapon System (GWS) program. The GWS program defends the United States against intermediate and intercontinental ballistic missile attacks. Under this competiti
Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Aug 02, 2022
A super-Earth planet has been found near the habitable zone of a red dwarf star only 37 light-years from the Earth. This is the first discovery by a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope and offers a chance to investigate the possibility of life on planets around nearby stars. With such a successful first result, we can expect that the Subaru Telescope will discover more, potentially even bette
Nagoya, Japan (SPX) Aug 02, 2022
A collaboration led by scientists at Nagoya University in Japan has investigated the nature of dark matter surrounding galaxies seen as they were 12 billion years ago, billions of years further back in time than ever before. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, offer the tantalizing possibility that the fundamental rules of cosmology may differ when examining the early history o
Cartwheel Galaxy (NIRCam and MIRI)

The Cartwheel Galaxy, a rare ring galaxy once shrouded in dust and mystery, has been unveiled by the imaging capabilities of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The galaxy, which formed as a result of a collision between a large spiral galaxy and another smaller galaxy, not only retained a lot of its spiral character, but has also experienced massive changes throughout its structure. Webb’s high-precision instruments resolved individual stars and star-forming regions within the Cartwheel, and revealed the behaviour of the black hole within its galactic centre. These new details provide a renewed understanding of a

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