Berlin, Germany (SPX) Jul 30, 2021
Under normal conditions, pure water is an almost perfect insulator. Water only develops metallic properties under extreme pressure, such as exists deep inside of large planets. Now, an international collaboration has used a completely different approach to produce metallic water and documented the phase transition at BESSY II. The study is published now in Nature. Every child knows that wa

Washington DC (SPX) Jul 30, 2021
Revolutionary laser technologies pioneered in DARPA's Defense Sciences Office over the past decades are allowing Air Force researchers to precisely characterize combustion elements in next-generation jet engines and providing commercial gas and oil developers continuous, region-scale monitoring to rapidly detect methane leaks. The Spectral Combs from UV to THz (SCOUT) program, which began

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
NASA's first spacecraft to explore the Trojan asteroids arrived Friday, July 30, at the agency's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. It is now in a cleanroom at nearby Astrotech, ready to begin final preparations for its October launch. The mission has a 23-day launch period beginning on October 16. Lucy will undergo final testing and fueling prior to being moved to its launch pad at Ca

Washington DC (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science announced a plan to provide $100 million over the next four years for university-based research on a range of high energy physics topics through a new funding opportunity announcement (FOA). The objective of this funding is to advance knowledge of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. "High energy physics play

Washington DC (UPI) Aug 3, 2021
Boeing postponed the launch of its Starliner spacecraft Tuesday due to problems detected with valves in the capsule's propulsion system and reset a potential launch for Wednesday midday. "We are off for today. Recycling for tomorrow," Tory Bruno, CEO of rocket company United Launch Alliance tweeted Tuesday morning. ULA had planned to launch an Atlas V rocket carrying the uncrewed

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
Rocket engines contain confined combustion systems, which are, essentially, combustion chambers. In these chambers, nonlinear interactions among turbulent fuel and oxidizer flows, sound waves, and heat produced from chemical reactions, cause an unstable phenomenon called 'combustion oscillations.' The force of these oscillations on the body of the combustion chamber-the mechanical stress o

McLean VA (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
Iridium Communications reports that Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has approved regulatory amendments necessary to allow for Japanese adoption of Iridium Certus broadband, Iridium Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC) and other aeronautical services for aviation and Iridium's Global Maritime Distress and Safety System service (GMDSS). Over the pas

Boston MA (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
As a not-so-distant future that includes space tourism and people living off-planet approaches, the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is designing and researching the activities humans will pursue in new, weightless environments. Since 2017, the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) has orchestrated regular parabolic flights through the ZERO-G Research Program to test experiments tha

Ann Arbor MI (SPX) Aug 03, 2021
The rise of oxygen levels early in Earth's history paved the way for the spectacular diversity of animal life. But for decades, scientists have struggled to explain the factors that controlled this gradual and stepwise process, which unfolded over nearly 2 billion years. Now an international research team is proposing that increasing day length on the early Earth-the spinning of the young

Washington DC (UPI) Aug 3, 2021
The International Space Station spun around 1 1/2 times on its main axis last week when a new Russian segment of the orbiting platform malfunctioned, a NASA spokesman said, as new details emerged about the incident. "Mission control got alerts on the ground at the same time astronauts got an alert that the attitude [position] of the space station was changing," Dan Huot, a NASA public a