Copernical Team
Making Martian rocket biofuel on Mars
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a concept that would make Martian rocket fuel, on Mars, that could be used to launch future astronauts back to Earth.
The bioproduction process would use three resources native to the red planet: carbon dioxide, sunlight, and frozen water. It would also include transporting two microbes to Mars. The first would be cyanobacteria (algae), which would take CO2 from the Martian atmosphere and use sunlight to create sugars. An engineered E. coli, which would be shipped from Earth, would convert those sugars into a Mars-specific propellant for rockets and other propulsion devices. The Martian propellant, which is called 2,3-butanediol, is currently in existence, can be created by E. coli, and, on Earth, is used to make polymers for production of rubber.
Euclid spacecraft integration
Video:
00:00:19
The Euclid payload and service module are currently at Thales Alenia Space in Torino, Italy, where they will be integrated to form the final, finished spacecraft.
In this video Euclid’s service module is being transferred onto a support near the payload module, in order to prepare it for further integration activities.
Euclid is ESA’s mission to map the geometry of the Universe and better understand the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
‘ESA Champions’ award initiative launched
Whether you are hosting a YouTube channel about space or volunteering to speak at your local school, we want to recognise and reward your passion and advocacy for space.
Crew-3 say cheese
Image:
ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and his NASA crew mates Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron are all smiles as they arrive at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA on 26 October 2021.
Collectively, the astronauts make up Crew-3 and will travel to the International Space Station on the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft “Endurance”. The first launch opportunity for Crew-3 is 07:21 CET (06:21 GMT, 02:21 EDT) Sunday 31 October 2021, with a backup date of 3 November.
The Dragon will dock with the Space Station 22 hours after launch, allowing for a short overlap with the Crew-2 members who
ESA acts to make air travel greener
Air passengers will soon be able to cut their carbon footprint when travelling on flights that are routed using satellites.
Hubble gives unprecedented, early view of a doomed star's destruction
Like a witness to a violent death, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recently gave astronomers an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the first moments of a star's cataclysmic demise. Hubble's data, combined with other observations of the doomed star from space- and ground-based telescopes, may give astronomers an early warning system for other stars on the verge of blowing up.
"We used to ta New galaxy images reveal a fitful start to the Universe
New images have revealed detailed clues about how the first stars and structures were formed in the Universe and suggest the formation of the Galaxy got off to a fitful start. An international team of astronomers from the University of Nottingham and Centro de Astrobiologia (CAB, CSIC-INTA) used data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the so-called Fron Astrophysicists reveal largest-ever suite of universe simulations
Collectively clocking in at nearly 60 trillion particles, a newly released set of cosmological simulations is by far the biggest ever produced. The simulation suite, dubbed AbacusSummit, will be instrumental in extracting secrets of the universe from upcoming surveys of the cosmos, its creators predict. They present AbacusSummit in several papers published October 25 in Monthly Notices of the Ro BeiDou-based monitoring system in operation at world's highest dam
A dam deformation monitoring system based on BeiDou Navigation Satellite System has been put into operation in Usoi Dam in Tajikistan, according to China's National Time Service Center (NTSC) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Sarez Lake, located in the Pamir region in eastern Tajikistan, has an altitude of 3,263 meters above sea level. It was naturally created in 1911 when an ea Searching for Earth 2.0? Zoom in on a star
Astronomers searching for Earth-like planets in other solar systems have made a breakthrough by taking a closer look at the surface of stars.
A new technique developed by an international team of researchers—led by Yale astronomers Rachael Roettenbacher, Sam Cabot, and Debra Fischer—uses a combination of data from ground-based and orbiting telescopes to distinguish between light signals coming from stars and signals coming from planets orbiting those stars.
A study detailing the discovery has been accepted by The Astronomical Journal.
"Our techniques pull together three different types of contemporaneous observations to focus on understanding the star and what its surface looks like," said Roettenbacher, a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellow at Yale and lead author of the paper.