The alignment of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is now complete. After a full review, the observatory has been confirmed to be capable of capturing crisp, well-focused images with each of its four powerful onboard science instruments. Upon completing the seventh and final stage of telescope alignment, the team held a set of key decision meetings and ...
The largest antenna ever tested in ESA’s Hertz radio frequency test chamber is this 5-m diameter transponder antenna. It will operate down on the ground to help calibrate the Biomass mission, which will chart all the forests on Earth. ESA antenna engineer Luis Rolo, who is overseeing the test campaign, explained: “This is a particularly challenging ...
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently flight-certified all 24 of the detectors the mission needs. When NASA’s Roman Space Telescope launches in the mid-2020s, these devices will convert starlight into electrical signals, which will then be decoded into 300-megapixel images of large patches of the sky. These images will allow astronomers to explore ...
When the four-decades-old Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, scientists celebrated. These plucky spacecraft had already traveled 120 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun to reach the boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble encompassing our solar system that’s affected by the solar wind. The ...
Much of the carbon in space is believed to exist in the form of large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Since the 1980s, circumstantial evidence has indicated that these complex carbon-based molecules are abundant in space, but they have not been directly observed. Now, a team of researchers led by MIT Assistant Professor Brett ...
An Australian research consortium has successfully tested a next-generation propulsion system that could enable high-speed flight and space launch services. The team’s rotating detonation engine, or RDE, is a major technical achievement and an Australian first. It was designed by RMIT University engineers and is being developed by a consortium led by DefendTex, with researchers ...
Researchers have used origami, the ancient Japanese art of paper folding, to possibly solve a key challenge for outer space travel — how to store and move fuel to rocket engines. The researchers have developed an origami-inspired, folded plastic fuel bladder that doesn’t crack at super cold temperatures and could someday be used to store ...
The universe is getting hotter, a new study has found. The study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, probed the thermal history of the universe over the last 10 billion years. It found that the mean temperature of gas across the universe has increased more than 10 times over that time period and reached about 2 million degrees ...
Artificial gravity has long been the stuff of science fiction. Picture the wheel-shaped ships from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Martian, imaginary craft that generate their gravity by spinning around in space. Now, a team from CU Boulder is working to make those out-there technologies a reality. The researchers, led by aerospace ...
What’s the coldest place you can think of? Temperatures on a winter day in Antarctica dip as low as −120ºF (−85ºC). On the dark side of the Moon, they hit −280ºF (−173ºC). But inside NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory on the International Space Station, scientists are creating something even colder. The Cold Atom Lab (CAL) is ...
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