Copernical Team
Earthlike planets in other solar systems? Look for moons
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Finding an exact copy of the Earth somewhere in the universe sounds like a far-fetched notion, but scientists believe that because Earth happened in our solar system, something similar is bound to exist someplace else. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher Siegfried Eggl and his colleagues say orbiting moons may play a key role in keeping planets habitable over long periods and iden ESO captures best images yet of peculiar "dog-bone" asteroid
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Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), a team of astronomers have obtained the sharpest and most detailed images yet of the asteroid Kleopatra. The observations have allowed the team to constrain the 3D shape and mass of this peculiar asteroid, which resembles a dog bone, to a higher accuracy than ever before. Their research provides clues as to how this aste NASA innovations will help US meet sustainable aviation goals
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NASA Administrator Bill Nelson joined federal government and industry leaders Thursday at a White House event highlighting sustainable aviation and the administration's focus on medium- and long-term goals to combat climate change.
The event highlighted a plan to reduce aviation carbon emissions through production of more than three billion gallons of sustainable fuel by 2030. Officials fr SpaceX to raise bar for space tourism with Inspiration4 launch
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SpaceX plans to reach new heights, literally, for space tourism Wednesday by launching the Inspiration4 mission from Florida - the first all-private spaceflight to orbit the Earth.
Two men and two women are scheduled to lift off in a Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center as early as 1 a.m. EDT.
The mission is the brainchild of American businessman Jared Isa Earth from Space: Danube Delta
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The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Danube Delta – the second largest river delta in Europe.
Selection begins | ESA’s next astronauts
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Work is under way to sort and assess applications from more than 22 500 ESA astronaut hopefuls. The rigorous selection process will take around 18 months. Initial screening to ensure that basic criteria are met will be followed by medical and psychological tests, exercises and interviews.
ESA plans to recruit 4-6 new astronauts through this 2021-22 selection round to support the future of European space exploration. This is likely to include missions to the International Space Station as well as the Moon. As part of the selection process, ESA is also assessing the feasibility of flying an astronaut
Volcanic trenches on Mars
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Image:
This image of the young volcanic region of Elysium Planitia on Mars [10.3°N, 159.5°E] was taken on 14 April 2021 by the CaSSIS camera on the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).
The two blue parallel trenches in this image, called Cerberus Fossae, were thought to have formed by tectonic processes. They run for almost one thousand km over the volcanic region. In this image, CaSSIS is looking straight down into one of these 2 km-wide fissures.
The floor here is a few hundred metres deep and is filled with coarse-grained sand, likely basaltic in composition, which appears blue in the
Cassini’s wake: how might a spacecraft disturb its own measurements?
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Simply by moving through the heavens, spacecraft change the space about them. Such interactions are invisible to the naked eye, but can endanger mission performance and safety. A new ESA Resarch Fellow study simulated the Cassini spacecraft in the vicinity of Saturn, checking their findings against actual space measurements. It reveals Cassini cast an ‘ion wake’ up to 6 m behind it, a void of plasma particles like a trail of a boat.
New spacesuit technology for moon and Mars exploration tested where Apollo astronauts once trained and tested spacesuits
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Satellite in sun's backyard unravels the origins of interplanetary dust
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What do shooting stars and astronaut safety have in common?
Both stem from the sub-microscopic rock fragments found throughout the solar system, sometimes called interplanetary dust.
When these particles collide with Earth's atmosphere, they create meteors, better known as shooting stars, as the (usually) microscopic fragments vaporize and leave flaming trails through the air. When they collide with astronauts, they can puncture holes in space suits—or worse. Understanding the sources and patterns of this interplanetary dust is therefore very important to NASA, as it plans for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.
During its revolutions around the sun, the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft, the mission going closer to the sun than anything in spacefaring history, is bombarded by these dust particles. When crashing onto the spacecraft, the tiny grains—some as small as a ten-thousandth of a millimeter across—vaporize and release a cloud of electrically charged particles that can be detected by FIELDS, a suite of instruments designed to detect electric and magnetic fields.
A pair of papers publishing this week in The Planetary Science Journal use FIELDS data to take an up-close look at the "zodiacal cloud," the collective term for these tiny particles.
