Copernical Team
The tilt in our stars: the shape of the Milky Way's halo of stars is realized
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A new study has revealed the true shape of the diffuse cloud of stars surrounding the disk of our galaxy. For decades, astronomers have thought that this cloud of stars - called the stellar halo - was largely spherical, like a beach ball. Now a new model based on modern observations shows the stellar halo is oblong and tilted, much like a football that has just been kicked.
The findings - New interactive map lets you scroll through the Universe
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A new map of the universe displays for the first time the span of the entire known cosmos with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping beauty. Created by Johns Hopkins University astronomers with data mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map allows the public to experience data previously only accessible to scientists. The interactive map, which depicts the actual position and real Black holes in eccentric orbit
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A research team from Jena (Germany) and Turin (Italy) has reconstructed the origin of an unusual gravitational wave signal. As the researchers write in the current issue of the scientific journal "Nature Astronomy", the signal GW190521 may result from the merger of two massive black holes that captured each other in their gravitational field and then collided while spinning around each other in NASA, Japan announce Gateway contributions, Space Station extension
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NASA and the Government of Japan on Thursday announced further contributions by Japan to Gateway, a key component of the agency's Artemis missions for long-term lunar exploration. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson participated virtually from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in an event held in Tokyo that included Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Keiko Nagao The first life in our solar system may have been on Mars
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When Mars was a young planet, it was bombarded by ice asteroids delivering water and organic molecules necessary for life to emerge. According to the professor behind a new study, this means that the first life in our solar system may have been on Mars.
Mars is called the red planet. But once, it was actually blue and covered in water, bringing us closer to finding out if Mars had ever harboure LOFTID inflatable heat shield test a success, early results show
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NASA's Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, or LOFTID, launched on Nov. 10, 2022, to demonstrate inflatable heat shield technology that could be key to landing humans on Mars.
About an hour after launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, LOFTD inflated and deployed in space. After being released by the Centaur upper stage, the heat shield, or aeroshell, began Arianespace Vega C mission set to complete Pleiades Neo constellation
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On Thursday, November 24, 2022 at 10:47 pm local time (01:47 am (UTC) on Friday, November 25), Arianespace's first Vega C mission will lift off from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, with the 30cm resolution satellites Pleiades Neo 5 and 6. This first commercial flight follows the success, July 13, of Vega C inaugural launch operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).
After liftoff fro NASA Moon mission 'exceeding' expectations
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On the third day after lifting off from Florida bound for the Moon, the Orion spacecraft is "exceeding performance expectations," NASA officials said on Friday.
The spacecraft is to take astronauts to the Moon in the coming years - the first to set foot on its surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
This first test flight, without a crew on board, aims to ensure that the vehicl NASA Moon mission 'exceeding' expectaions
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On the third day after lifting off from Florida bound for the Moon, the Orion spacecraft is "exceeding performance expectations," NASA officials said on Friday.
The spacecraft is to take astronauts to the Moon in the coming years—the first to set foot on its surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
This first test flight, without a crew on board, aims to ensure that the vehicle is safe.
"Today we met to review the Orion spacecraft performance... it is exceeding performance expectations," said Mike Sarafin, head of the Artemis 1 mission.
The spacecraft's four solar panels, about 13 feet (four meters) long, deployed correctly and are providing more energy than expected, said Jim Geffre, the Orion manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
NASA Webb micrometeoroid mitigation update
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Micrometeoroid strikes are an unavoidable aspect of operating any spacecraft. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was engineered to withstand continual bombardment from these dust-sized particles moving at extreme velocities, to continue to generate groundbreaking science far into the future.
"We have experienced 14 measurable micrometeoroid hits on our primary mirror, and are averaging one to two per month, as anticipated. The resulting optical errors from all but one of these were well within what we had budgeted and expected when building the observatory," said Mike Menzel, Webb lead mission systems engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "One of these was higher than our expectations and prelaunch models; however, even after this event our current optical performance is still twice as good as our requirements."
To ensure all parts of the observatory continue to perform at their best, NASA convened a working group of optics and micrometeoroid experts from NASA Goddard's Webb team, the telescope's mirror manufacturer, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.