In Aug. 2024, a team of NASA researchers and partners gathered in Missoula, to test new drone-based technology for localized forecasting, or micrometeorology. Researchers attached wind sensors to a drone, NASA’s Alta X quadcopter, aiming to provide precise and sustainable meteorological data to help predict fire behavior.
As more satellites, telescopes, and other spacecraft are built to be repairable, it will take reliable trajectories for service spacecraft to reach them safely. Researchers in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are developing a methodology that will allow multiple CubeSats to act as servicing agents to assemble or repair a space telescope.
A unique dataset of Type Ia supernovae being released today could change how cosmologists measure the expansion history of the universe.
Asteroids that orbit close to the Earth inevitably cause us some anxiety due to the even remote possibility of a collision. But their proximity also offers ample opportunities to learn more about the universe. Ryugu, a 900-meter diameter asteroid in the Apollo belt, has recently proven useful in our search for signs of life’s precursors elsewhere in our solar system.
Before arriving at the moon, the small satellite mission will use the gravity of the sun, Earth, and moon over several months to gradually line up for capture into lunar orbit.
Astrophysicists have unearthed a surprising diversity in the ways in which white dwarf stars explode in deep space after assessing almost 4,000 such events captured in detail by a next-gen astronomical sky survey. Their findings may help us more accurately measure distances in the universe and further our knowledge of “dark energy.”
The threat of a newly discovered asteroid has risen slightly in the past few weeks, as the world’s telescopes rush to track its course. But the chance of an impact is still quite slim.
In the race to combat global climate change, much attention has been given to natural carbon sinks: those primarily terrestrial areas of the globe that absorb and sequester more carbon than they release. While scientists have long known that coastal salt marshes are just such a sink for “blue carbon,” or carbon stored in the ocean and coastal ecosystems, it has been difficult to get an accurate estimate of just how much they store, and so most of the focus has been on terrestrial sinks such as forests and grasslands.
Where is all the water that may form oceans on distant planets and moons? The SPHEREx astrophysics mission will search the galaxy and take stock.
Among the roughly 10 billion white dwarf stars in the Milky Way galaxy, a greater number than previously expected could provide a stellar environment hospitable to life-supporting exoplanets, according to astronomers at the University of California, Irvine.
A team of physicists at Fudan University, working with colleagues from Henan University, both in China, and from Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore and Donostia International Physics Center, in Spain, has developed a way to generate topological structures in surface water using gravity water waves. In their study published in Nature, the group used their technique to generate structures such as wave vortices, skyrmions and Möbius strips.
The core of a massive cluster of galaxies appears to be pumping out far more stars than it should. Now researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a key ingredient within the cluster that explains the core’s prolific starburst.
Jumping workouts could help astronauts prevent the type of cartilage damage they are likely to endure during lengthy missions to Mars and the moon, a new Johns Hopkins University study suggests.
A bouquet of thousands of stars in bloom has arrived. This composite image contains the deepest X-ray image ever made of the spectacular star-forming region called 30 Doradus.
From helping catalyze interstellar reactions and fueling the birth of stars to its presence in neighborhood gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter, trihydrogen, or H3+, is best known as the “the molecule that made the universe.”
The appearance of the interstellar objects (ISOs) ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov in 2017 and 2019, respectively, created a surge of interest. What were they? Where did they come from? Unfortunately, they didn’t stick around and wouldn’t cooperate with our efforts to study them in detail. Regardless, they showed us something: Milky Way objects are moving around the galaxy.
Locomotion makes things move, and certain forms of locomotion make them move better than others. Those more effective types of locomotion change depending on the environment, which is even more true for space exploration. Methods that might work well on Earth or even other planets, such as helicopters, might be utterly useless on others. But specialized forms of locomotion abound, and the NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC) phase I grants for this year include a closer look at one such specialized form—jumping.
Kokoro Hosogi, a physics student at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has achieved a rare honor for an undergraduate: her contributions are being recognized in a study published in the journal Nature. The researcher recently supported the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) studying celestial X-ray objects to help illuminate why gas at the core of the Centaurus galaxy cluster approximately 170 million light years away is not generating young new stars as rapidly as predicted, a discovery with important implications on the evolution of galaxy clusters.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully integrated the mission’s deployable aperture cover—a visor-like sunshade that will help prevent unwanted light from entering the telescope—to the outer barrel assembly, another structure designed to shield the telescope from stray light in addition to keeping it at a stable temperature.
Traditional black holes, as predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, contain what are known as singularities, i.e., points where the laws of physics break down. Identifying how singularities are resolved in the context of quantum gravity is one of the fundamental problems in theoretical physics.
