Copernical Team
Lunar crater named after Arctic Explorer Matthew Henson
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The International Astronomical Union has named a crater at the Moon's south pole after the Arctic explorer Matthew Henson, a Black man who in 1909 was one of the first people to stand at the very top of the world. The proposal to name the crater after Henson came from Jordan Bretzfelder, an Exploration Science summer intern with the Lunar and Planetary Institute, in Houston, TX, which is a membe NASA offers new website to look at Mars rover images
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Fans of NASA's Mars rover Perseverance can now see the robotic explorer and its activity in a 3D depiction of the Red Planet terrain via a new website.
The site, Explore with Perseverance, is updated when the rover makes a significant move. NASA has uploaded seven locations, starting with the Octavia E. Butler Landing Site at which the spacecraft landed Feb. 18.
Software develope NASA plans to send lunar rover to Nobile region of moon's South Pole
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NASA's ice-hunting VIPER lunar rover, scheduled to arrive on the moon in 2023, would land near the Nobile Crater on the lunar South Pole, the space agency announced Monday.
The crater offers a relatively safe area to hunt for water ice, which is considered crucial for long-term Artemis missions to explore the moon and eventually Mars, NASA officials said. The ice could provide a water s Small stature limits Mars' ability to hold water, study finds
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For a planet to be habitable, it must be able to hold significant amounts of liquid water.
When considering a planet's potential habitability, scientists mostly look at a planet's atmosphere and its distance from its host star. But novel research out of Washington University in St. Louis suggests size matters, too.
According to the new study, published Monday in the journal PNAS, Discovery about meteorites informs atmospheric entry threat assessment
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Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign watched fragments of two meteors as they ramped up the heat from room temperature to the temperature it reaches as it enters Earth's atmosphere and made a significant discovery. The vaporized iron sulfide leaves behind voids, making the material more porous. This information will help when predicting the weight of a meteor, its likelihoo Artemis rover to land near Nobile region of Lunar south pole
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In 2023, NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will land near the western edge of the Nobile Crater at the Moon's South Pole to map and explore the region's surface and subsurface for water and other resources. Part of Artemis, VIPER will launch on a SpaceX Falcon-Heavy rocket for delivery to the Moon by Astrobotic's Griffin lander under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload
NASA selects Moon site for ice-hunting rover
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NASA on Monday announced it would land an ice-seeking rover on a region of the Moon's south pole called the Nobile Crater in 2023.
The space agency hopes the robot will confirm the presence of water ice just below the surface, which could one day be converted into rocket fuel for missions to Mars and deeper into the cosmos.
"Nobile Crater is an impact crater near the south pole that was born through a collision with another smaller celestial body," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's planetary science division told reporters.
It is one of the solar system's coldest regions, and has only so far been probed from afar using sensors such as those aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite.
Solar electric propulsion makes NASA's Psyche spacecraft go
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When it comes time for NASA's Psyche spacecraft to power itself through deep space, it'll be more brain than brawn that does the work. Once the stuff of science fiction, the efficient and quiet power of electric propulsion will provide the force that propels the Psyche spacecraft all the way to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The orbiter's target: A metal-rich asteroid also called Psyche.
The spacecraft will launch in August 2022 and travel about 1.5 billion miles (2.4 billion kilometers) over three and a half years to get to the asteroid, which scientists believe may be part of the core of a planetesimal, the building block of an early rocky planet.
How many satellites are orbiting Earth?
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It seems like every week, another rocket is launched into space carrying rovers to Mars, tourists or, most commonly, satellites. The idea that "space is getting crowded" has been around for a few years now, but just how crowded is it? And how crowded is it going to get?
I am a professor of physics and director of the Center for Space Science and Technology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Many satellites that were put into orbit have gone dead and burned up in the atmosphere, but thousands remain.
A catalog of solar stream interactions
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When a fast solar wind stream erupts from a coronal hole (a cooler region in the Sun's atmosphere) and overtakes a slower moving solar wind stream, a stream interaction region (SIR) can form. In the SIR, a density "pileup" of compressed plasma develops upstream of the interface; typically there is a peak in pressure followed by a rarefaction region in the fast solar wind component. As the SIR propagates away from the Sun, to distances of one astronomical unit or beyond, the compression can form a shock that efficiently accelerates charged particles.
