Check out what's coming in 2021

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NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins performs the Grasp experiment in the Columbus module of the International Space Station ahead of the New Year. The experiment studies how the central nervous system, specifically hand-eye coordination, adapts to microgravity.

Grasp stands for Gravitational References for Sensimotor Performance and seeks to better understand how the central nervous system integrates information from different senses, such as sight, sound and touch, to coordinate hand movements and determine what role gravity plays.

How does the experiment work? Mike dons virtual reality (VR) gear that is coupled with a laptop and driven by an audio/graphics system. The VR

Stanford CA (SPX) Jan 05, 2021
Polarons are fleeting distortions in a material's atomic lattice that form around a moving electron in a few trillionths of a second, then quickly disappear. As ephemeral as they are, they affect a material's behavior, and may even be the reason that solar cells made with lead hybrid perovskites achieve extraordinarily high efficiencies in the lab. Now scientists at the Department of Energ

London, UK (SPX) Jan 05, 2021
Inmarsat this week marks the fifth anniversary of its Global Xpress (GX) network entering service worldwide. GX is the world's first and only globally available, high-speed broadband network, owned and managed by a single operator. It is already driving the digital transformation of major industries across the world, enhancing fundamentally the way maritime, aviation, government and humanitarian

Madison IL (SPX) Jan 05, 2021
Deforestation dropped by 18 percent in two years in African countries where organizations subscribed to receive warnings from a new service using satellites to detect decreases in forest cover in the tropics. The carbon emissions avoided by reducing deforestation were worth between $149 million and $696 million, based on the ability of lower emissions to reduce the detrimental economic con

Moscow (Sputnik) Jan 05, 2021
According to the report, the robot, designed by London-based Spacebit, is expected to join the NASA mission, landing on the lunar surface next summer, which will be the first step towards Britain having a rover on the Moon. Britain is to launch a little "space spider" Asagumo probe to the Moon in 2021, the Telegraph reported. The designers opted for multiple legs instead of wheels so

Lake Forest CA (SPX) Jan 05, 2021
Aircraft and aeronautics are one of the essential industries for every developed country. It will cost very high, and heavy investment loads tend to make them secure from damaging and rusting. Even a single paint coating is very expensive for an aircraft. Then the question is how to save them from rust, dust, and radiation particles. The innovation is a thin film coating that brings revolu

Beijing (XNA) Jan 05, 2021
China's historic 23-day Chang'e 5 mission has not only obtained precious rocks and soil samples from the moon, but has also brought back a group of seeds that traveled the furthest in the nation's agricultural and forestry histories. More than 30 kinds of seeds, including rice, oats, alfalfa and orchid, were placed inside the multi-module Chang'e 5 spacecraft and orbited around the moon fo

Moscow (Sputnik) Jan 05, 2021
While the crack has already been located and patched up by the space station's crew, a more permanent solution is expected once special repair equipment reaches the ISS in February. The crack discovered in the hull of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS) in October might have been caused by a micrometeorite impact, head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogo

Houston TX (SPX) Jan 05, 2021
Houston Spaceport, the nation's 10th commercially licensed Spaceport, will be home to the world's first commercial space station builder, Axiom Space. The aerospace company announced plans to create a 14-acre headquarters campus to train private astronauts and begin production of its Axiom Station-the world's first free-flying, internationally available private space station that will serve as h