
Copernical Team
NASA starts loading fuel for James Webb Space Telescope launch

Testing confirms Webb Telescope on track for targeted Dec 22 Launch

Alaska scientist reveals cause of lost magnetism at meteorite site

430-foot asteroid expected to swipe past Earth on Monday

Pulsar Fusion Demonstrates Green Mach-7 rocket in Switzerland

Exploring together, NASA and industry embrace laser communications

Our televisions and computer screens display news, movies, and shows in high-definition, allowing viewers a clear and vibrant experience. Fiber optic connections send laser light densely packed with data through cables to bring these experiences to users.
NASA and commercial aerospace companies are applying similar technologies to space communications, bringing optical speeds to the final frontier. Free-space optical communications leverages recent advancements in telecommunications to allow spacecraft to send high-resolution images and videos over laser links.
"Free-space" refers to the absence of the insulated, fiber optic cables that enable the terrestrial internet. Free-space laser communications flow freely through the vacuum of space, however atmosphere poses unique challenges to communications engineers.
NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) will send data to and from ground stations and, eventually, in-space user missions over laser links.
"LCRD leverages the work done in the telecommunications industry for the past several decades. We're taking the concepts that they've created and applying them to space," said Russ Roder, product design lead for LCRD's optical module.
Science at the cusp: NASA rocket to study mysterious area above the North Pole

Strange things happen in Earth's atmosphere at high latitudes. Around local noon, when the Sun is at its highest point, a funnel-shaped gap in our planet's magnetic field passes overhead. Earth's magnetic field shields us from the solar wind, the stream of charged particles spewing off the Sun. The gap in that field, called the polar cusp, allows the solar wind a direct line of access to Earth's atmosphere.
Radio and GPS signals behave strangely when they travel through this part of the sky. In the last 20 years, scientists and spacecraft operators noticed something else unusual as spacecraft pass through this region: They slow down.
"At around 250 miles above Earth, spacecraft feel more drag, sort of like they've hit a speed bump," said Mark Conde, a physicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the principal investigator for NASA's Cusp Region Experiment-2, or CREX-2, sounding rocket mission.
Galileo satellites placed on Soyuz launcher

Cosmic pearl

It can be hard to appreciate that a human-made, football-pitch-sized spacecraft is orbiting 400 km above our heads, but there it is.
The jewel of human cooperation and ingenuity that is the International Space Station shines brightly in this image captured by ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet from the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour.
Crew-2 got these amazing views during a flyaround of the orbiting lab after undocking from the Harmony module on 8 November, before their return to Earth.
Since this image was taken, there has even been a new addition in the form of the Russian Node Module, known as Prichal.
Solar Orbiter flies by Earth before beginning final journey to Sun

The Solar Orbiter space probe had a brief encounter with its home planet on Saturday morning when it circled the Earth for the first and last time while executing a gravity assist to slow itself down before setting off for the Sun.
Solar Orbiter launched in February 2020, and has already flown through the tail of a comet, flown by Venus and captured the most detailed photographs of the Sun ever taken.
On Saturday morning at 5.30 a.m. (CET) the spacecraft flew over the Earth at an altitude of 460 kilometers (285 miles), passing directly over North Africa and the Canary Islands.
According to the ESA, in order to execute the orbits the probe risked impact with the space debris the surrounds Earth. But according to Simon Plum, head of mission operations at the ESA control center in Darmstadt, the risk of collision was minimal.
In a worst case scenario of potential collision, he said, the probe could have initiated an evasive maneuver up to six hours before impact. However, Plum said, this had not been necessary and the orbiter was now on its way back into deep space.