Copernical Team
NASA awards contract for 3D-printed construction on moon, Mars
A Texas-based company has landed a five-year contract from NASA to build landing pads, roads and shelter on the moon and on Mars.
ICON, which is known for its 3D-printed homes and military barracks, announced Tuesday it has won a $57 million contract from NASA to build Project Olympus, which will 3D-print infrastructure constructed from existing materials on the moon and Mars. The compa SpaceX postpones mission to put Japanese lander on Moon
SpaceX on Wednesday postponed by one day a mission to launch the first private - and Japanese - lander to the Moon.
A Falcon 9 rocket is now scheduled to blast off at 3:37 am (0837 GMT) Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. SpaceX said on Twitter that the delay was to carry out more pre-flight checks.
Until now, only the United States, Russia and China have managed to put a robot on t Image: Hubble Telescope spies sparkling spray of stars in NGC 2660
This glittering group of stars, shining through the darkness like sparks left behind by a firework, is NGC 2660 in the constellation Vela, best viewed in the southern sky. NGC 2660 is an open cluster, a type of star cluster that can contain anywhere from tens to a few hundreds of stars loosely bound together by gravity.
The stars of open clusters form out of the same region of gas and dust and thus share many characteristics, such as age and chemical composition. Unlike globular clusters—their ancient, denser, and more tightly-packed cousins—open clusters are easier to study since astronomers can more easily distinguish between individual stars. Their stars can be old or young, and they may disperse after a few million years into the spiral or irregular galaxies where they are born.
The spikes surrounding many of the stars in this image are "diffraction spikes," which occur when the glow from bright points of light reflects off of Hubble's secondary mirror support.
China latest astronaut crew docks at the Tiangong Space Station
China on Tuesday launched the Shenzhou-15 spacecraft carrying three astronauts to its space station, where they will complete the country's first-ever crew handover in orbit, state news agency Xinhua reported. The trio blasted off in a Long March-2F rocket at 11:08 pm (1508 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwestern China's Gobi desert, Xinhua said, citing the China Manned Space Administration (CMSA) NASA's Juno mission spots two Jovian moons
On Nov. 29, 2021, NASA's Juno mission completed its 38th close flyby of Jupiter. As the spacecraft sped low over the giant planet's cloud tops, its JunoCam instrument captured this look at two of Jupiter's largest moons.
In the foreground, hurricane-like spiral wind patterns called vortices can be seen spinning in the planet's north polar region. These powerful storms can be over 30 miles (50 kilometers) in height and hundreds of miles across.
Below Jupiter's curving horizon, two Jovian moons make an appearance: Callisto (below) and Io (above).
Juno will make close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, the first such close encounters with this intriguing moon in over two decades. Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system, and its eruptions leave a trail of material behind that both fills Jupiter's magnetosphere and creates a torus of gas and dust around Jupiter. During the flybys, Juno will study Io's volcanoes and geology, search for signs of a magma ocean, and investigate how Io interacts with Jupiter's giant magnetosphere.
Europa's plate tectonic activity is unlike Earth's
Plate tectonics represents a defining framework of modern geoscience, accounting for large-scale features on Earth's surface, such as mountains and valleys, as well as the processes that shape them, like volcanoes and earthquakes. Present-day plate tectonics have not been observed on any other world in the solar system, and evidence of past activity on planets such as Mars and Venus is circumstantial.
Developing the low-energy ion spectrometer for the Chinese BeiDou-3 satellite
In our daily lives, we rely on weather forecasts to know whether it will rain tomorrow. The monitoring and prediction of space weather such as geomagnetic storms and substorms are also vital for the operation safety of satellites outside the atmosphere and the living conditions of astronauts in space. However, space weather is far more unpredictable than the weather on Earth, which depends on in-situ measurements of plasma parameters by satellites.
A research team, led by Prof. Wang Yuming and Prof. Shan Xu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a low-energy ion spectrometer (LEIS) onboard a Chinese geosynchronous satellite, the BeiDou-3 satellite.
The LEIS is designed for measurement of the ion energy per charge distribution with good energy-, angular-, and temporal-resolutions, which is helpful for space weather monitoring and early warning. Recently, the scientific data acquired by the LEIS were published in Science China Technological Sciences.
Starting in 2012, the research team designed and realized the LEIS payload that meets the requirements of a magnetospheric mission. Through simulation and experimental tests, the LEIS payload had been valuated and calibrated, and it was finally finished in 2017.
Japanese company aims to put first private lander on Moon, with UAE rover on board
SpaceX is set Wednesday to launch the first private—and Japanese—lander to the Moon.
A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off at 3:39 am (0839 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a backup date on Thursday.
Until now, only the United States, Russia and China have managed to put a robot on the lunar surface.
The mission, by Japanese company ispace, is the first of a program called Hakuto-R.
The lander would touch down around April 2023 on the visible side of the Moon, in the Atlas crater, according to a company statement.
Measuring just over 2 by 2.5 meters, it carries on board a 10-kilogram rover named Rashid, built by the United Arab Emirates.
Simple semiconductor solutions could boost solar energy generation and enable better space probes
A 'simple' tweak to perovskite solar cells during the fabrication stage could help to unlock the untold potential of the renewable energy source, claims research from the University of Surrey.
Surrey's Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) has demonstrated that by precisely controlling the fabrication process, it is possible to regulate and reduce unwanted energy loss in perovskite solar pan China launches crewed mission to Tiangong space station
China launched the Shenzhou-15 spacecraft on Tuesday carrying three astronauts to its space station, where they will complete the country's first-ever crew handover in orbit, state news agency Xinhua reported.
The trio blasted off in a Long March-2F rocket at 11:08 pm (1508 GMT) from the Jiuquan launch centre in northwestern China's Gobi desert, Xinhua said, citing the China Manned Space A