Copernical Team
Finding explanation for Milky Way's warp
The Milky Way is often depicted as a flat, spinning disk of dust, gas, and stars. But if you could zoom out and take an edge-on photo, it actually has a distinctive warp - as if you tried to twist and bend a vinyl LP.
Though scientists have long known through observational data that the Milky Way is warped and its edges are flared like a skirt, no one could explain why.
Now, Harvard Tracing the origin and energization of plasma in the heliosphere
Imagine that you have a secret decoder ring that you can use to decipher a secret message with important clues about things around you: where they came from, why they are there, and what will become of them in the future. Now imagine that the secret decoder ring is actually a sensor that can be flown in space to unravel secrets about the matter in the solar system. Where did this matter originat Source of electron acceleration and X-ray aurora of Mercury
Since Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun among the solar system planets, it is strongly influenced by the solar wind, a high-speed (several hundred km/s) stream of plasma blowing from the Sun. Explorations of Mercury was first carried out by the Mariner 10 spacecraft in 1974 and 1975, which revealed that Mercury has a magnetic field, and thus a magnetosphere, similar to that of Earth. In t Evolution Space to produce and test solid rocket motors at Stennis
NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, joined with Evolution Space on Oct. 10 to announce plans for the aerospace company to establish production and testing operations for solid rocket motors onsite.
"This is another great addition to south Mississippi's commercial space engagement," Center Director Dr. Rick Gilbrech said. "Evolution Space gains access to critical NA 5 things to know about NASA's deep space optical communications
Slated to launch on Oct. 12 with the Psyche mission, DSOC will demonstrate technologies enabling the agency to transmit higher data rates from deep space.
NASA's pioneering Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment will be the first demonstration of laser, or optical, communications from as far away as Mars.
Want to explore Neptune? Use Triton's atmosphere to put on the brakes
Aerobraking is commonly used to slow down spacecraft when they arrive at various planetary systems. It requires a spacecraft to dip into the atmosphere of a celestial body in the planetary system, such as a moon or the planet itself, and use the resistance from that atmosphere to shed some of its velocity. That slow-down would then allow it to enter an orbit in the planetary system without carrying the extra fuel required to do the maneuvers through powered flight, thereby saving weight on the mission and reducing its cost.
Unfortunately, saying the orbital dynamics of such a maneuver are complicated is an understatement. But ultimately, for any aerobraking to be viable, someone has to do the math. And that's just what Jakob Brisby and Jame Lyne, a graduate student and professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, did for some of the least visited planetary systems in the solar system—Neptune.
'Ring of fire' solar eclipse will slice across Americas on Saturday with millions along path
NASA's Roman mission gears up for a torrent of future data
Webb captures an ethereal view of NGC 346
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NGC 346 (MIRI image) Measuring nutrition in crops from space
With many people around the world suffering from various forms of malnutrition it’s important that the absolute basics such as rice, soya and wheat are as nourishing as possible. ESA-funded research shows that the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and the Italian Prisma mission could be used to monitor the nutritional content of staple crops. This could, for example, help farmers take appropriate steps to boost the quality of their crops as they grow.