Copernical Team
Astronauts need a fridge
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For astronauts to go on long missions to the moon or Mars, they need a refrigerator. But today's fridges aren't designed to work in zero gravity - or upside down if oriented that way when a spacecraft lands on another planet.
A team of engineers from Purdue University, Air Squared Inc., and Whirlpool Corporation is working on building a fridge for zero gravity that operates in different or Fast-spinning black holes narrow the search for dark matter particles
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Ultralight bosons are hypothetical particles whose mass is predicted to be less than a billionth the mass of an electron. They interact relatively little with their surroundings and have thus far eluded searches to confirm their existence. If they exist, ultralight bosons such as axions would likely be a form of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85 percent of the matter New Tactical ISR Satellites Provide Global, Persistent Support For Warfighters
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Lockheed Martin is addressing the accelerating demand for space-enabled warfighting capabilities with a new line of rapid, integrated and affordable tactical Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) satellites.
These satellites, based on Lockheed Martin's LM 400 mid-size bus, enable tactical warfighters to track moving targets at long ranges and operate in contested and denied e Earth from Space: Space Coast, Florida
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On 22 April 2021, on Earth Day, Thomas Pesquet is planned to return to the International Space Station for his second mission, Alpha. Ahead of his launch, the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over Cape Canaveral, USA, in a region known as the Space Coast.
La Soufrière volcano: before-and-after
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Image:
False-colour images captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2 show the aftermath of the explosive volcanic eruption that took place on 9 April 2021 on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. NASA spacecraft leaves mess after grabbing asteroid samples
SpaceX, NASA give 'go' for astronaut launch, 3rd for Dragon
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Peering through the clouds of Earth's 'Evil Twin' surprises NRL sky watchers
Galileo sunspot sketches versus modern 'deep learning' AI
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It's a fascinating thought to consider.
What exactly did the Sun look like, centuries ago? What would we see, if astronomers back in the time of Kepler and Galileo had modern technology monitoring the Sun across the electromagnetic spectrum, available to them?
Thanks to modern artificial intelligence, there may be a way to actually 'see' just what state the Sun was in, way back in those days of yore. A recent study, titled "Generation of Modern Satellite Data from Galileo Sunspot Drawings in 1612 by Deep Learning" out February 2021 in the Astrophysical Journal of the American Astronomical Society used an innovative set of deductions to compare sketches of sunspots with modern views from ground and space-based observations. The study was led by Harim Lee from Kyung Hee University in the Republic of South Korea.
Galileo and the Sun
Sunspot records represent one of the longest sets of astronomical data available, going all the way back to Chinese observations in 1128 A.D.
Space law is an important part of the fight against space debris
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Space is getting crowded. More than 100 million tiny pieces of debris are spinning in Earth orbit, along with tens of thousands of bigger chunks and around 3,300 functioning satellites.
Large satellite constellations such as Starlink are becoming more common, infuriating astronomers and baffling casual skywatchers. In the coming decade, we may see many more satellites launched than in all of history up to now.
Collisions between objects in orbit are getting harder to avoid. Several technologies for getting space debris out of harm's way have been proposed, most recently the plan from Australian company Electro Optic Systems (EOS) to use a pair of ground-based lasers to track debris and "nudge" it away from potential collisions or even out of orbit altogether.
Tools like this will be in high demand in coming years. But alongside new technology, we also need to work out the best ways to regulate activity in space and decide who is responsible for what.
Active debris removal
EOS's laser system is just one of a host of "active debris removal" (ADR) technologies proposed over the past decade.