Copernical Team
Juno returns to 'Clyde's Spot' on Jupiter
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During its 33rd low pass over the cloud tops of Jupiter on April 15, 2021, NASA's Juno spacecraft captured the intriguing evolution of a feature in the giant planet's atmosphere known as "Clyde's Spot."
The feature is informally named for amateur astronomer Clyde Foster of Centurion, South Africa, who discovered it in 2020 using his own 14-inch telescope. On June 2, 2020, just two days after Foster's initial discovery, Juno provided detailed observations of Clyde's Spot (upper image), which scientists determined was a plume of cloud material erupting above the top layers of the Jovian atmosphere just southeast of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which is currently about 1.3 times as wide as Earth. These powerful convective outbreaks occasionally occur in this latitude band, known as the South Temperate Belt. The initial plume subsided quickly, and within a few weeks it was seen as a dark spot.
Many features in Jupiter's highly dynamic atmosphere are short lived, but the April 2021 observation from the JunoCam instrument (lower image) revealed that nearly one year after its discovery, the remnant of Clyde's Spot had not only drifted away from the Great Red Spot but had also developed into a complex structure that scientists call a folded filamentary region.
How ESA boosts climate education
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A series of fascinating new learning resources are enabling teachers in the UK to encourage the next generation of climate pioneers.
The freely available lesson plans and activities – which add to ESA’s portfolio of space-powered climate learning materials – were highlighted at the Climate Change Teacher Conference, a live-streamed online summit for British primary and secondary school educators that took place this week.
Quantum communication in space moves ahead
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Keeping information secure in today’s interconnected world is becoming ever more important, so ESA is supporting efforts to ensure that future communications are kept confidential.
Similar states of activity identified in supermassive and stellar mass black holes
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The researchers Juan A. Fernandez-Ontiveros, of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Rome and Teo Munoz-Darias, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC), have written an article in which they describe the different states of activity of a large sample of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies.
They have classified them using the behaviour of their closest " SpaceX cargo mission to carry water bears, baby squids to space station
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SpaceX's 22nd cargo resupply mission, slated to launch no earlier than June 3, will see several unique science experiments - involving water bears, baby squids and kidney stones - ferried to the International Space Station.
Like so many experiments before them, the bulk of the experimental setups being carried aboard SpaceX CRS-22 are designed to illuminate the health risks facing ast Cramming it all into three hundred and thirty seconds of microgravity
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On 24 May 2021, three experiments from the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) set off on their short journey into microgravity and back again. The DLR sounding rocket MAPHEUS 11 lifted off from the Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden and carried the materials science experiments MARS, X-RISE and SOMEX to an altitude of 221 kilometres. In the 15 minutes b Canada to send rover to Moon by 2026: minister
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Canada will land a robotic rover on the Moon within five years, its industry minister said Wednesday, announcing that Ottawa plans to "dream big" as it advances its competitive stake in the growing global space market.
"Canada will be part of space history," Francois-Philippe Champagne told a news conference.
"We recognize that global interest in space and in the space industry is on the rise," he said. "As the whole world looks to the stars we are ready to make Canada a world leader in research, technology and innovation so that we can be there as well."
"Let's seize the moment. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be Canadian, and dream big."
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will partner with the United States' NASA on the mission, according to a statement.
Two Canadian companies will first be selected to develop concepts for the rover and science instruments for the mission.
Study reveals new details on what happened in the first microsecond of Big Bang
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About 14 billion years ago, our universe changed from being a lot hotter and denser to expanding radically - a process that scientists have named 'The Big Bang'.
And even though we know that this fast expansion created particles, atoms, stars, galaxies and life as we know it today, the details of how it all happened are still unknown.
Now a new study performed by researchers from Uni Thirty year stellar survey cracks mysteries of galaxy's giant planets
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Current and former astronomers from the University of Hawai?i Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have wrapped up a massive collaborative study that set out to determine if most solar systems in the universe are similar to our own. With the help of W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawai?i, the 30-year planetary census sought to find where giant planets tend to reside relative to their host stars. Deep oceans dissolve the rocky shell of water-ice planets
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What is happening deep beneath the surface of ice planets? Is there liquid water, and if so, how does it interact with the planetary rocky "seafloor"? New experiments show that on water-ice planets between the size of our Earth and up to six times this size, water selectively leaches magnesium from typical rock minerals.
The conditions with pressures of hundred thousand atmospheres and tem