Copernical Team
NASA weighs Crew Dragon rescue for stranded Starliner crew
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What was meant to be a weeklong trip to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first NASA astronauts to fly with Boeing could extend to eight months, with the agency considering bringing them home on a SpaceX spaceship.
A final decision on whether to persist with Boeing's troubled Starliner - which experienced worrying propulsion issues as it flew up to the orbital platform in June - Here's how Curiosity's sky crane changed the way NASA explores Mars
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Twelve years ago, NASA landed its six-wheeled science lab using a daring new technology that lowers the rover using a robotic jetpack.
NASA's Curiosity rover mission is celebrating a dozen years on the red planet, where the six-wheeled scientist continues to make big discoveries as it inches up the foothills of a Martian mountain. Just landing successfully on Mars is a feat, but the Curiosity mission went several steps further on Aug. 5, 2012, touching down with a bold new technique: the sky crane maneuver.
A swooping robotic jetpack delivered Curiosity to its landing area and lowered it to the surface with nylon ropes, then cut the ropes and flew off to conduct a controlled crash landing safely out of range of the rover.
The Perseids are here. Here's how to see the 'fireballs' of summer's brightest meteor shower
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The Perseids are back to dazzle the sky with bursts of light and color.
The annual meteor shower, active since July, peaks before dawn Monday. It's one of the brightest and most easily viewed showers of the year, producing "bright blue meteors—and lots of them," said University of Warwick astronomer Don Pollacco.
More than 50 meteors per hour are expected, according to the American Meteor Society. The shower lasts through Sept.
Drop it like it's hot: Space Rider model falls gracefully
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Over the last four months, the Space Rider team has been running a drop-test campaign whereby a full-scale model of the future orbital laboratory is dropped from a helicopter to test and qualify the deployment of its parachutes, at Salto di Quirra in Sardinia, Italy.
The Space Rider project is an uncrewed laboratory about the size of two minivans that will be able to stay in orbit for up to two months. The spacecraft comes in two parts, an orbital module that supplies everything it needs to fly around our planet and a reentry module that brings Space Rider and its experiments back to Earth.
Over the course of this test campaign that started in April and is expected to finish in autumn, the teams are using a model of Space Rider that has a similar weight distribution as the real 3,000 kg reentry module. This allows the team to test the parachutes, parafoil and control winches that automatically guide the spacecraft to a soft touchdown on Earth.
Dropped from a maximum height of 3.5 km, drogue chutes deploy to help slow down the test model to a safe speed to extract the parafoil that will allow the spacecraft to be steered to a landing strip.
Promising early tests for variable-thrust landing engine
Mermaid on salty Mars
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Mermaid on salty Mars Astronomers use AI to Detect Stars Consuming Planets
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Astronomers have recently discovered hundreds of "polluted" white dwarf stars within the Milky Way. These stars are actively consuming planets in their orbit, providing a valuable opportunity to study the interiors of these distant, disintegrated planets. However, finding these stars has traditionally been a challenge.
Previously, astronomers had to manually sift through vast amounts of su NASA uses digital models to enhance aeronautical innovation
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As NASA advances its aeronautics research, the agency is leveraging Model-Based Systems Analysis and Engineering (MBSAE) to ensure the collective benefits of various technologies. MBSAE digitally simulates the integration of multiple technologies into a cohesive system using advanced digital tools and computing programs.
The objective is to optimize the next generation of aviation technolo Plasma Bubble Confirmed as Source of Persistent Emission in Fast Radio Burst FRB20201124A
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Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) have emerged as one of the most intriguing puzzles in modern astrophysics. These brief but intense bursts of radio waves release an enormous amount of energy in just a few milliseconds, placing them among the most energetic phenomena in the cosmos. Discovered just over a decade ago, FRBs primarily originate from extragalactic sources, yet their precise origins remain unc AI Competition Targets Exoplanet Atmospheres
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The European Space Agency's Ariel space mission and the NeurIPS 2024 machine learning conference are hosting a competition to address one of astronomy's most challenging data analysis problems: extracting faint exoplanetary signals from noisy space telescope observations. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute to exoplanet atmosphere research and compete for a prize pool of $50,000 
