Image: Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, is featured in this image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Chicago IL (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
Electric space propulsion systems use energized atoms to generate thrust. The high-speed beams of ions bump against the graphite surfaces of the thruster, eroding them a little more with each hit, and are the systems' primary lifetime-limiting factor. When ion thrusters are ground tested in an enclosed chamber, the ricocheting particles of carbon from the graphite chamber walls can also redeposi

Odense, Denmark (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
Think of bringing a pot of water to the boil: As the temperature reaches the boiling point, bubbles form in the water, burst and evaporate as the water boils. This continues until there is no more water changing phase from liquid to steam. This is roughly the idea of what happened in the very early universe, right after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. The idea comes from partic

Baltimore MD (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf - the surviving core of a burned-out, Sun-like star. Researchers found that the white dwarf is 56 percent the mass of our Sun. This agrees with earlier theoretical predictions of the white dwarf's mass and corroborates current theories of how white dwarfs evo

West Lafayette IN (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
With temperatures on the moon ranging from minus 410 to a scorching 250 degrees Fahrenheit, it's an understatement to say that humans will need habitats with heat and air conditioning to survive there long term. But heating and cooling systems won't be effective enough to support habitats for lunar exploration or even longer trips to Mars without an understanding of what reduced gravity do

Cambridge UK (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
Researchers have theorised a new mechanism to generate high-energy 'quantum light', which could be used to investigate new properties of matter at the atomic scale. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, along with colleagues from the US, Israel and Austria, developed a theory describing a new state of light, which has controllable quantum properties over a broad range of frequ

Tel-Aviv, Israel (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
The Center for Quantum Science and Technology at Tel Aviv University has built the first ground station in Israel - and among the most advanced in the world - for tracking, sensing, hyperspectral imaging, and optical and quantum communication with satellites in orbit around the Earth. The station includes a satellite observatory dome with a diameter of 4.25 meters, a tracking system, a primary h

Luxembourg (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
Kleos Space has reached the milestone of daily product delivery collected from a strategically critical area of interest to its early adopter customers. RF data is collected by the Vigilance Mission (KSF1) satellites and is then processed through Kleos systems to generate intelligence products. The Vigilance Mission RF data collection satellites are in a sun synchronous low Earth orbit ena

Washington DC (SPX) Feb 03, 2023
"All things are numbers," avowed Pythagoras. Today, 25 centuries later, algebra and mathematics are everywhere in our lives, whether we see them or not. The Cambrian-like explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) brought numbers even closer to us all, since technological evolution allows for parallel processing of a vast amounts of operations. Progressively, operations between scalars (num