Copernical Team
AFRL, Northrop Grumman demonstrate solar to radio frequency conversion
The Air Force Research Laboratory's and Northrop Grumman's Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research (SSPIDR) Project have successfully conducted the first end-to-end demonstration of key hardware for the Arachne flight experiment. A ground demonstration of novel components for the "sandwich tile" were used to successfully convert solar energy to radio frequency (RF) - a fu
NASA's Webb Telescope Keeping Cool with Ultra-thin DuPont Kapton Polyimide Films
After 30 years in development, the National Aeronautics Space Administration's (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched on December 25, 2021, from the European Space Agency's launch site at Kourou in French Guiana. DuPont technology, in the form of ultra-thin Kapton polyimide films, is the crucial material protecting the JWST from the light and the heat of the sun, enabling it to fu
Perseverance Samples in Review: 2021
As the 2021 calendar year comes to a close, it's nice to sit back and reflect on all the progress we've made on Mars this year. It's been a busy ~300 sols for both Perseverance and our helicopter sidekick, Ingenuity! One of Perseverance's mission objectives is to collect and store samples of the martian surface for eventual return back to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. T
Webb Telescope Aft Sunshield Pallet Deployed
Webb is beginning to resemble the form it will take when it is fully deployed - now that the mission operations team has successfully deployed and latched into place the observatory's forward and aft Unitized Pallet Structures. The team began working through the deployment of the forward pallet this morning, concluding at approximately 1:21 p.m. EST. The team then moved on to the aft palle
99 objects telling tales from ESA's technical heart
From simulated moondust to an ultraflat floor, a 3D-printed human bone to a wall decoration that once flew on the Hubble Space Telescope, the new 99 Objects of ESA ESTEC website gives visitors a close-up view of intriguing, often surprising artifacts assembled together to tell the story of ESA's technical heart.
"Objects are what matter," famed anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote. "Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings." So what manner of objects come out of more than half a century of activity at Europe's biggest space center?
The European Space Research and Technology Centre, ESTEC, is ESA's singe largest establishment, based on the North Sea coast at Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
Often described as the technical heart of ESA, ESTEC is where most ESA projects are born and where they are guided through the various phases of development.
UK firm closer to offering global internet via satellites
A Russian Soyuz rocket on Monday took 36 more satellites from British operator OneWeb into orbit, bringing the company more than halfway towards its goal of providing global broadband internet. The London-headquartered company is working to complete the construction of a constellation of low earth orbit satellites providing enhanced broadband and other services to countries around the planet
China slams US after space station 'close encounters' with Musk's satellites
Beijing on Tuesday accused the United States of irresponsible and unsafe conduct in space over two "close encounters" between the Chinese space station and satellites operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX. Tiangong, China's new space station, had to manoeuvre to avoid colliding with one Starlink satellite in July and with another in October, according to a note submitted by Beijing to the United Na
Tracking down the forces that shaped our solar system's evolution
Meteorites are remnants of the building blocks that formed Earth and the other planets orbiting our Sun. Recent analysis of their isotopic makeup led by Carnegie's Nicole Nie and published in Science Advances settles a longstanding debate about the geochemical evolution of our Solar System and our home planet. In their youth, stars are surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust. Over ti
Wandering celestial bodies provide a glimpse into the formation of stars and planets
The nature of free-floating planets (FFPs) is still mysterious. FFPs might originate in two ways: they either form on their own, like stars, through the gravitational collapse of small clouds of gas, or they form like planets around stars and then get stripped off from their stellar systems. Until now it was hard to investigate which formation mechanism is more likely, as a large homogenous samp
Astronomers Detect Signature of Magnetic Field on an Exoplanet
An international team of astronomers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to discover the signature of a magnetic field in a planet outside our solar system. The finding, described in a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy, marks the first time such a feature has been seen on an exoplanet. A magnetic field best explains the observations of an extended region of charged carbon particl