Copernical Team
How scientists found rare fireball meteorite pieces on a driveway—and what they can teach us
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As people in the UK were settling down to watch the late evening news on February 28, a fresh news story, quite literally, appeared in the night sky. A large and very bright fireball was seen over southern England and northern France at 21:54 GMT. It was recorded by many doorbell webcams, so it was a very well-observed fireball. More importantly, it was also captured by the automated cameras of the UK Meteor Observation Network and similar networks.
Working with colleagues in France and Australia, the meteor-watchers worked out the fireball's trajectory and determined where the meteorite pieces could be located, just north of Cheltenham in the UK. Based on their calculations, Ashley King, a specialist in meteorites at the Natural History Museum in London, made an appeal on local TV and radio stations for information about any unusual black rocks seen to have fallen from the sky.
The role of reentries
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Using reentries to clean up A dose of Moonlight
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An orange pouch and a yellow cable are paving the way for missions to the Moon. By monitoring space radiation and enabling faster communications, the Dosis-3D experiment and the Columbus Ka-band or ColKa terminal, respectively, are providing the insights needed to enable safer missions father out in space.
Orange Dosis-3D pouches are everywhere in the Columbus laboratory on the International Space Station. A series of active and passive dosimeters, they measure space radiation inside the module as well as how it penetrates the Space Station’s walls.
Radiation levels in space are up to 15 times higher than on Earth. As soon
How Galileo performed first-ever authenticated positioning fix
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In a first for any satellite navigation system, Galileo has achieved a positioning fix based on open-service navigation signals carrying authenticated data. Intended as a way to combat malicious ‘spoofing’ of satnav signals, this authentication testing began at ESA’s Navigation Laboratory – the same site where the very first Galileo positioning fix took place back in 2013.
Most distant cosmic jet providing clues about early universe
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Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have found and studied the most distant cosmic jet discovered so far - a jet of material propelled to nearly the speed of light by the supermassive black hole in a quasar some 13 billion light-years from Earth. The quasar is seen as it was when the universe was only 780 m Establishing the origin of solar-mass black holes and the connection to dark matter
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What is the origin of black holes and how is that question connected with another mystery, the nature of dark matter? Dark matter comprises the majority of matter in the Universe, but its nature remains unknown.
Multiple gravitational wave detections of merging black holes have been identified within the last few years by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), comm How fast is the universe expanding? Galaxies provide one answer
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Determining how rapidly the universe is expanding is key to understanding our cosmic fate, but with more precise data has come a conundrum: Estimates based on measurements within our local universe don't agree with extrapolations from the era shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
A new estimate of the local expansion rate - the Hubble constant, or H0 (H-naught) - reinforces th A billion years from now, a lack of oxygen will wipe out life on Earth
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Earth will not be able to support and sustain life forever. Our oxygen-rich atmosphere may only last another billion years, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience.
As our Sun ages, it is becoming more luminous, meaning that in the future Earth will receive more solar energy. This increased energy will affect the surface of the planet, speeding up the weathering of silicate rocks suc SpaceX plans Starlink launch, seeks approval of Internet service for vehicles
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Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to launch 60 Starlink broadband Internet satellites from Florida on Tuesday, while the company seeks federal approval to beam the service to trucks, boats and aircraft around the world.
The launch is planned for 9:50 p.m. EST aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The weather is expected to be nearly perfect for la Stacking complete for twin Space Launch System rocket boosters
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Stacking is complete for the twin Space Launch System (SLS) solid rocket boosters for NASA's Artemis I mission. Over several weeks, workers used one of five massive cranes to place 10 booster segments and nose assemblies on the mobile launcher inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Engineers with Exploration Ground Systems placed the first seg