Copernical Team
For some scientists, Mars 2020 is a mission of perseverance
Intern develops software for ESA space experiment
A student interning at ESA will soon see her work launched into space. Meadhbh Griffin of University College Dublin has spent the last five months writing and testing software for an experiment set to fly later this year on the Hungarian-led RadCube CubeSat. While its main mission is to probe space weather in Earth orbit, RadCube will also host a miniature experiment to test how commercial computer memories withstand space radiation.
Galileo will help Lunar Pathfinder navigate around Moon
ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder mission to the Moon will carry an advanced satellite navigation receiver, in order to perform the first ever satnav positioning fix in lunar orbit. This experimental payload marks a preliminary step in an ambitious ESA plan to expand reliable satnav coverage – as well as communication links – to explorers around and ultimately on the Moon during this decade.
ESA's technical heart
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ESA's technical heart New podcast episode: Columbus' launch to orbit
The latest episode of ESA Explores podcast series ‘Time and Space’ series is out now, with a focus on the launch of Europe’s Columbus laboratory.
Perseverance rover captures the sounds of driving on Mars
NASA's newest rover recorded audio of itself crunching over the surface of the Red Planet, adding a whole new dimension to Mars exploration.
As the Perseverance rover began to make tracks on the surface of Mars, a sensitive microphone it carries scored a first: the bangs, pings, and rattles of the robot's six wheels as they rolled over Martian terrain.
"A lot of people, when they see the images, don't appreciate that the wheels are metal," said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
A brighter future for gravitational-wave astronomy
Future gravitational-wave detectors on Earth will use laser light with even higher power than in current instruments. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), the Laser Zentrum Hannover e.V. (LZH), and Leibniz University Hannover have now developed a new laser system for this purpose.
They combined the custom tailored light from Missing baryons found in far-out reaches of galactic halos
Researchers have channeled the universe's earliest light - a relic of the universe's formation known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - to solve a missing-matter mystery and learn new things about galaxy formation. Their work could also help us to better understand dark energy and test Einstein's theory of general relativity by providing new details about the rate at which galaxies are m Peering into a galaxy's dusty core to study an active supermassive black hole
Researchers using NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will map and model the core of nearby galaxy Centaurus A.
Centaurus A is a giant of a galaxy, but its appearances in telescope observations can be deceiving. Dark dust lanes and young blue star clusters, which crisscross its central region, are apparent in ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light, painting a fairly subdued l Jupiter's Great Red Spot feeds on smaller storms
The stormy, centuries-old maelstrom of Jupiter's Great Red Spot was shaken but not destroyed by a series of anticyclones that crashed into it over the past few years.
The smaller storms cause chunks of red clouds to flake off, shrinking the larger storm in the process. But the new study found that these disruptions are "superficial." They are visible to us, but they are only skin deep on t