Image: Ariane 5 flight VA260, Juice mission: fully integrated and ready for rollout at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana

Welcome to Jupiter space: to one side looms the vast cloudy face of the largest planet in our Solar System; in the other appears a shrunken Sun, like a spotlight in the sky, with just 3% of the illumination from Earth orbit arriving here. This basic fact presented a major challenge to those planning ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, mission: how to make solar power work in such a gloomy environment, located an average 778 million km away from our parent star? 

Tuscaloosa AL (SPX) Apr 10, 2023
Through global-scale seismic imaging of Earth's interior, research led by The University of Alabama revealed a layer between the core and the mantle that is likely a dense, yet thin, sunk ocean floor, according to results published in Science Advances. Seen only in isolated patches previously, the latest data suggests this layer of ancient ocean floor may cover the core-mantle boundary. Su

Rochester UK (SPX) Apr 10, 2023
Earth is a dynamic and constantly changing planet. From the formation of mountains and oceans to the eruption of volcanoes, the surface of our planet is in a constant state of flux. At the heart of these changes lies the powerful force of plate tectonics-the movements of Earth's crustal plates. This fundamental process has shaped the current topography of our pla

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Apr 11, 2023
NASA has awarded a sole source Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) to Capella Space Corporation of San Francisco to provide high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) (0.5 meter to 1.2 meters) commercial Earth observation data products. Under this agreement, the government will issue fixed-price BPA Calls for these products, at a not-to exceed value of $7 million per Call. The work will b

Niversity Park PA (SPX) Apr 11, 2023
A research lab at Penn State will equally share a three-year, $2.55 million grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) with three other teams at Carnegie Mellon University and the Adolphe Merkle Institute of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. The multidisciplinary research collaboration aims to develop a framework for the design and production of soft, self-charging,

Huntsville AL (SPX) Apr 11, 2023
Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) cut the ribbon on a new, two-building campus located just outside of Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, expanding its launch and missile defense development capability. This campus will be home to over 1,000 Northrop Grumman employees in the Huntsville area. "Our new lab enables us to deliver innovative solutions to our customers on rapid time

Washington DC (UPI) Apr 11, 2023
Elon Musk's Twitter marked the BBC and NPR as "government-funded" on Saturday but has not applied the label to Tesla or SpaceX - which have received billions in subsidies. Despite the significant contributions of federal and local governments to his businesses, Twitter this week decided to label NPR as "state-affiliated" media. After pushback from NPR, Twitter has since changed the l

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) Apr 11, 2023
A NASA constellation of four storm tracking CubeSats are getting a new launch location as they prepare to study tropical cyclones beginning in the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season. NASA's Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats (TROPICS) will observe the atmosphere to increase our unders