Copernical Team
Making methane on Mars
Among the many challenges with a Mars voyage, one of the most pressing is: How can you get enough fuel for the spacecraft to fly back to Earth?
Houlin Xin, an assistant professor in physics & astronomy, may have found a solution.
He and his team have discovered a more efficient way of creating methane-based rocket fuel theoretically on the surface of Mars, which can make the return trip all more feasible.
The novel discovery comes in the form of a single-atom zinc catalyst that will synthesize the current two-step process into a single-step reaction using a more compact and portable device.
Check out what's coming in 2021
Check out what's coming in 2021
A good GRASP on the New Year
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NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins performs the Grasp experiment in the Columbus module of the International Space Station ahead of the New Year. The experiment studies how the central nervous system, specifically hand-eye coordination, adapts to microgravity.
Grasp stands for Gravitational References for Sensimotor Performance and seeks to better understand how the central nervous system integrates information from different senses, such as sight, sound and touch, to coordinate hand movements and determine what role gravity plays.
How does the experiment work? Mike dons virtual reality (VR) gear that is coupled with a laptop and driven by an audio/graphics system. The VR
First glimpse of polarons forming in a promising next-gen energy material
Polarons are fleeting distortions in a material's atomic lattice that form around a moving electron in a few trillionths of a second, then quickly disappear. As ephemeral as they are, they affect a material's behavior, and may even be the reason that solar cells made with lead hybrid perovskites achieve extraordinarily high efficiencies in the lab.
Now scientists at the Department of Energ Inmarsat confirms plans Global Xpress extension
Inmarsat this week marks the fifth anniversary of its Global Xpress (GX) network entering service worldwide. GX is the world's first and only globally available, high-speed broadband network, owned and managed by a single operator. It is already driving the digital transformation of major industries across the world, enhancing fundamentally the way maritime, aviation, government and humanitarian Subscriptions to satellite alerts linked to decreased deforestation in Africa
Deforestation dropped by 18 percent in two years in African countries where organizations subscribed to receive warnings from a new service using satellites to detect decreases in forest cover in the tropics.
The carbon emissions avoided by reducing deforestation were worth between $149 million and $696 million, based on the ability of lower emissions to reduce the detrimental economic con UK eyes plan to send first rover to Moon in 2021
According to the report, the robot, designed by London-based Spacebit, is expected to join the NASA mission, landing on the lunar surface next summer, which will be the first step towards Britain having a rover on the Moon.
Britain is to launch a little "space spider" Asagumo probe to the Moon in 2021, the Telegraph reported.
The designers opted for multiple legs instead of wheels so Advantages of thin-film coating in aircraft coating
Aircraft and aeronautics are one of the essential industries for every developed country. It will cost very high, and heavy investment loads tend to make them secure from damaging and rusting. Even a single paint coating is very expensive for an aircraft.
Then the question is how to save them from rust, dust, and radiation particles. The innovation is a thin film coating that brings revolu Space-bred seeds offer valuable opportunities
China's historic 23-day Chang'e 5 mission has not only obtained precious rocks and soil samples from the moon, but has also brought back a group of seeds that traveled the furthest in the nation's agricultural and forestry histories.
More than 30 kinds of seeds, including rice, oats, alfalfa and orchid, were placed inside the multi-module Chang'e 5 spacecraft and orbited around the moon fo Roscosmos Head reveals likely cause of crack in ISS module hull
While the crack has already been located and patched up by the space station's crew, a more permanent solution is expected once special repair equipment reaches the ISS in February.
The crack discovered in the hull of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) in October might have been caused by a micrometeorite impact, head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogo 
