Copernical Team
Ariane 5 flight VA260, carrying the Juice mission, is fully integrated and ready for rollout
Ariane 5 for flight VA260 carrying ESA's Juice mission is seen here fully integrated and ready for rollout for its planned April 13, 2023 launch from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana.
Juice—JUpiter ICy Moons Explorer—is humankind's next bold mission to the outer solar system. After an eight-year journey to Jupiter, it will make detailed observations of the gas giant and its three large ocean-bearing moons: Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
This ambitious mission will characterize these moons with a powerful suite of remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments to discover more about these compelling destinations as potential habitats for past or present life. Juice will monitor Jupiter's complex magnetic, radiation and plasma environment in depth and its interplay with the moons, studying the Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giant systems across the universe.
Provided by European Space Agency
In booming satellite market, micro-rockets are the next big thing
More and more miniature satellites are being launched every year, driving up demand for smaller rockets.
Contemporary life would hardly be possible without satellites. Much of what people do on Earth today relies heavily on what's happening high above their heads—from monitoring wildfires, deforestation and sea-surface temperatures to enabling connections to new mobile technologies like 5G in hard-to-reach areas.
A recent wave of cheaper, miniature satellites being sent into low orbits of 500 to 1,000 kilometers above Earth by the likes of Elon Musk's SpaceX and UK-based OneWeb signals a growing trend.
Less is more
With some tracking the globe's whole landmass and providing unprecedented detail, these satellites can be the size of a shoebox or even smaller.
Ariane 5 flight VA260, Juice: fully integrated and ready for rollout
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Ariane 5 flight VA260, Juice mission: fully integrated and ready for rollout at Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana S Korea to conduct 1st launch of commercial-grade satellite
Juice: running on solar power in the dark
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?
Beneath the Earth, ancient ocean floor likely surrounds the core
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 Was plate tectonics occurring when life first formed on Earth?
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 NASA awards agreement for high-resolution synthetic aperture radar
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 Fish-inspired, self-charging electric battery may help power space applications
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, Northrop Grumman expands space technology capabilities in Huntsville
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 
