Astronauts live and work in orbit along with teaming populations of microorganisms, which could present a serious threat to health – and even the structural integrity of spacecraft. To help combat such invisible stowaways, an ESA-led project is developing microbe-killing coatings suitable for use within spacecraft cabins.

Exeter UK (SPX) May 20, 2022
Satellites and drones can provide key information to protect pollinators, researchers say. Their study examines new ways of using these technologies to track the availability of flowers, and says this could be combined with behavioural studies to see the world through the eyes of insects. The flowers available to insects vary from day to day and place to place, and human activity is

Lausanne, Switzerland (SPX) May 20, 2022
Three-dimensional (3D) mapping is a very useful tool, such as for monitoring construction sites, tracking the effects of climate change on ecosystems and verifying the safety of roads and bridges. However, the technology currently used to automate the mapping process is limited, making it a long and costly endeavor. "Switzerland is currently mapping its entire landscape using airborne lase

John Gould for NASA Aeronautics News
Cleveland OH (SPX) May 20, 2022 What if we told you we could reimagine the way a jet engine works to generate the same amount of power using less fuel? Our aeronautical innovators are designing a new jet engine that, compared to current engines, will produce the same thrust and even look the same on the outside, but is more fuel-efficient. HyTEC, or Hybrid Thermally Efficient Core,

Albuquerque NM (SPX) May 20, 2022
New research suggests an unseen 'mirror world' of particles that interacts with our world only via gravity that might be the key to solving a major puzzle in cosmology today - the Hubble constant problem. The Hubble constant is the rate of expansion of the universe today. Predictions for this rate - from cosmology's standard model - are significantly slower than the rate found by our most

Heidelberg, Germany (SPX) May 20, 2022
Astronomers have resolved the decade-long solar abundance crisis: the conflict between the internal structure of the Sun as determined from solar oscillations (helioseismology) and the structure derived from the fundamental theory of stellar evolution, which in turn relies on measurements of the present-day Sun's chemical composition. New calculations of the physics of the Sun's atmosphere yield

Plainsboro NJ (SPX) May 20, 2022
Mysterious fast radio bursts release as much energy in one second as the Sun pours out in a year and are among the most puzzling phenomena in the universe. Now researchers at Princeton University, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have simulated and proposed a cost-effective experiment to produce and obse

Baltimore MD (SPX) May 20, 2022
Completing a nearly 30-year marathon, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has calibrated more than 40 "milepost markers" of space and time to help scientists precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe - a quest with a plot twist. Pursuit of the universe's expansion rate began in the 1920s with measurements by astronomers Edwin P. Hubble and Georges Lemaitre. In 1998, this led to the di

Friedrichshafen, Germany (SPX) May 20, 2022
Airbus has been awarded a contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to further develop the implementation of LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna), one of the most ambitious science missions ESA has planned to date. With Phase B1 now underway, the detailed mission design and final technology development activities for the gravitational wave observatory are due to be completed by 2024, wi

Beijing (XNA) May 20, 2022
Mars rover Zhurong has been switched to dormant mode while waiting out a dust storm on the surface of the planet, the China National Space Administration said on Friday. The latest images taken by cameras onboard China's Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter show a dust storm passing over the patrol area of Zhurong. Scientists compared them with photos taken in the last two months and analyzed recent pow