Copernical Team
Mars' changing habitability recorded by ancient dune fields in Gale crater
Understanding whether Mars was once able to support life has been a major driving force for Mars research over the past 50 years. To decipher the planet's ancient climate and habitability, researchers look to the rock record—a physical record of ancient surface processes which reflect the environment and the prevailing climate at the time the rocks were deposited.
In a new paper published in JGR: Planets, researchers on the NASA-JPL Mars Science Laboratory mission used the Curiosity rover to add another piece to the puzzle of Mars' ancient past by investigating a unit of rocks within Gale crater.
They found evidence of an ancient dune field preserved as a layer of rocks in Gale crater, which overlies rock layers that were deposited in a large lake. The rock remnants of the dune field are known today as the Stimson formation.
The findings help scientists understand surface and atmospheric processes—such as the direction the wind blew sand to form dunes—and potentially how Mars' climate evolved from an environment that potentially harbored microbial life, to an uninhabitable one.
Dodging debris to keep satellites safe
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Our planet is surrounded by spacecraft helping us study our changing climate, save lives following disasters, deliver global communication and navigation services and help us answer important scientific questions.
But these satellites are at risk. Accidental collisions between objects in space can produce huge clouds of fast-moving debris that can spread and damage additional satellites with cascading effect.
In this animation, find out how teams at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, take action to keep satellites safe after receiving an alert warning of a possible collision between an active satellite and a piece of
ESA astronaut André Kuipers on sheltering from space debris
André Kuipers is one of a handful of astronauts who has had to 'shelter-in-place' from a piece of marauding space debris.
SolAero Technologies' Ingenuity on Mars
SolAero Technologies, a leading provider of high efficiency solar cells composite structural products for satellite and aerospace applications, congratulates the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) on the successful maiden flight of the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity. SolAero is proud to have supplied the solar panel that has enabled the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Hide and Seek - How NASA's Lucy Mission Team Discovered Eurybates' Satellite
On Jan. 9, 2020, NASA's Lucy mission officially announced that it would be visiting not seven, but eight asteroids. As it turns out, Eurybates, one of the asteroids along Lucy's path, has a small satellite.
Though searching for satellites is one of the mission's central goals, finding these tiny worlds before Lucy is launched gives the team the opportunity to investigate their orbits and p Can a new type of glacier on Mars aid future astronauts
On April 21, 1908, near Earth's North Pole, the Arctic explorer Frederick Albert Cook scrawled in his diary a memorable phrase: "We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice." These words may soon take on new significance for humankind in another dead world of hidden ice, submerged beneath the red sand of its frigid deserts. This dead world is Mars, and the desert is the planet's The End of Space Access
Many recent articles have expressed concern about the growing amount of junk floating around Earth in low orbits. Ultimately, the mass and distribution of junk and active satellites will exceed the capacity of space to safely contain the debris generated by the addition of more than an estimated 50,000 new satellites planned for deployment in the next few years. If and when this limit is reached China Orbiting 400 Satellites, Heading for 1,000 by 2030, US Space Command Chief Says
China now has 400 satellites in orbit, second only in number to the United States and it is projected to have at least one thousand of them deployed by the end of this decade, Space Command chief Army General James Dickinson said in congressional testimony on Tuesday.
"Back in 2010 they had 70 satellites in orbit: Today they have 400," Dickinson told the US Senate Armed Services Committee. OneSat Final Design Review successfully achieved
Airbus has passed an important milestone for the OneSat flexible satellite product line, with the Final Design Review successfully achieved with customers and space agencies.
The fully reconfigurable OneSat product line features major innovations and disruptive technologies including the latest digital processing and active antennas enabling several thousand beams. In addition, to meet the Outback radio telescope discovers dense, spinning, dead star
Astronomers have discovered a pulsar - a dense and rapidly spinning neutron star sending radio waves into the cosmos - using a low-frequency radio telescope in outback Australia.
The pulsar was detected with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, in Western Australia's remote Mid West region.
It's the first time scientists have discovered a pulsar with the MWA but they believ 
