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NASA selects mission to study black holes, cosmic x-ray mysteries Washington DC (SPX) Jan 04, 2017 NASA has selected a science mission that will allow astronomers to explore, for the first time, the hidden details of some of the most extreme and exotic astronomical objects, such as stellar and supermassive black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. Objects such as black holes can heat surrounding gases to more than a million degrees. The high-energy X-ray radiation from this gas can be polarized - vibrating in a particular direction. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission will ... read more |
3-D images reveal features of Martian polar ice caps Three-dimensional subsurface images are revealing structures within the Martian polar ice caps, including previously obscured layering, a larger volume of frozen carbon dioxide contained in the sout ... more NASA took another big step to ensure reliable crew transportation to the International Space Station into the next decade. The agency's Commercial Crew Program has awarded an additional four crew ro ... more Last year Asier Marzo, then a doctoral student at the Public University of Navarre, helped develop the first single-sided acoustic tractor beam - that is, the first realization of trapping and pulli ... more For the development of animals, nothing - with the exception of DNA - may be more important than oxygen in the atmosphere. Oxygen enables the chemical reactions that animals use to get energy from s ... more |
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NASA testing SLS for transonic behavior Tucked away in Hampton, Virginia, is a 56-year-old NASA wind tunnel capable of generating winds speeds of up to 900 miles per hour. In its lifetime, the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel has hosted hundreds ... more Vibration tests are one of the many tests that spacecraft and instruments endure to ensure they are fit for spaceflight. During routine testing of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, an unexpected re ... more NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission has released preliminary data on the heights of Greenland coastal glaciers from its first airborne campaign in March 2016. The new data show the d ... more SpaceX says it has determined the cause of a launchpad explosion that destroyed a satellite in September and is ready to start launches again as early as Sunday. ... more Calcium silicate hydrate, or C-S-H, accounts for the strength of cement and cement-based materials. It is the component of cement paste that holds concrete together. ... more |
Smart tech: This year's CES big on artificial intelligence Faster production of advanced, flexible electronics is among the potential benefits of a discovery by researchers at Oregon State University's College of Engineering. Taking a deeper look at p ... more Building nanomaterials with features spanning just billionths of a meter requires extraordinary precision. Scaling up that construction while increasing complexity presents a significant hurdle to t ... more |
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The batteries that store the energy generated by the International Space Station's four solar panel arrays are being replaced. The initial work, which will be executed by the space station's robotic arm Dextre, is scheduled to begin on New Year's Eve. Over the course of two weeks, the space station's 12 older nickel-hydrogen will be replaced by six new lithium-ion power packs, which wer ... more |
SpaceX says it has determined the cause of a launchpad explosion that destroyed a satellite in September and is ready to start launches again as early as Sunday. An unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded September 1 in Cape Canaveral, destroying a satellite that Facebook planned to use to beam high-speed internet to Africa. That marked a setback for the California-based private space f ... more |
NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, which has been in service at Mars since October 2001, put itself into safe mode - a protective standby status - on Dec. 26, while remaining in communication with Earth. The Odyssey project team has diagnosed the cause - an uncertainty aboard the spacecraft about its orientation with regard to Earth and the sun - and is restoring the orbiter to full operations. ... more |
China is planning to conduct the first orbiting and roving exploration of Mars by 2020, the country's State Council Information Office (SCIO) said Tuesday in a report. "China intends to execute its first Mars exploration operation, and grasp key technologies for orbiting, landing and roving exploration. It plans to launch the first Mars probe by 2020 to carry out orbiting and roving explor ... more |
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Europe's largest aerospace group Airbus Defence and Space (Airbus DS) will develop and manufacture an advanced medium-class satellite platform in cooperation with Russia's Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC) Energia, head of Airbus DS in Russia Vladimir Terekhov said. "This platform is our latest product created jointly by our industrial cooperation, that is why it does not even hav ... more |
Calcium silicate hydrate, or C-S-H, accounts for the strength of cement and cement-based materials. It is the component of cement paste that holds concrete together. Researchers have struggled to understand the nanostructure of C-S-H, as it is extremely complex. Luckily, tobermorite serves as a naturally occurring crystalline analog. New analysis of tobermorite microstructures suggests ... more |
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It isn't an animal, a plant, or a fungus. The slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) is a strange, creeping, bloblike organism made up of one giant cell. Though it has no brain, it can learn from experience, as biologists at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (CNRS, Universite Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier) previously demonstrated.1 Now the same team of scientists has gone a step further, pr ... more |
As 2016 ends, I can't help but point out an interesting symmetry in where the mission has recently been and where we are going. Exactly two years ago we had just taken New Horizons out of cruise hibernation to begin preparations for the Pluto flyby. And exactly two years from now we will be on final approach to our next flyby, which will culminate with a very close approach to a small Kuiper Bel ... more |
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Last spring, researchers made Newly discovered 'Casper' octopod at risk from deep-sea minings with the discovery of what was surely a new species of octopod, crawling along the seafloor at a record-breaking ocean depth of more than 4,000 meters (about 2.5 miles) off Necker Island near Hawaii. The octopod's colorless and squishy appearance immediately inspired the nickname "Casper." Now, a ... more |
China plans to form a BeiDou network consisting of 35 satellites for global navigation services by 2020, said a white paper released by the State Council Information Office on Tuesday. The country plans to start providing basic services to countries along the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st-century Maritime Silk Road in 2018, said the document titled "China's Space Activities in 2016." ... more |
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China is planning missions to explore the far side of the Moon and to send robots to explore both lunar poles. Plans to send astronauts to the Moon are also being discussed, according to Wu Yanhua, vice director of the China National Space Administration. Wu told a press conference on Tuesday that work on the Chang'e-5 lunar mission, scheduled to make a soft landing on the Moon and r ... more |
A fireworks-type display of Quadrantid meteors will likely peak in North America on Tuesday or Wednesday. Astronomers disagree on the exact peak of the Quadrantid, whose bright fireballs are one of the most vibrant celestial shows of the year. Some say it will be pre-dawn Tuesday and others say late night Tuesday into early Wednesday is the best time to watch. At least some shootings st ... more |
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Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the major greenhouse gases, and causes great concern due to the rapid increase in its atmospheric concentrations. China launched its first minisatellite dedicated to the carbon dioxide detection and monitoring at 15:22 UTC on December 22, 2016. The Chinese Carbon Dioxide Observation Satellite (TANSAT) was designed to focus on the global observation of CO2. Fo ... more |
The Space Science Institute was awarded a grant from the Moore Foundation that will provide 1.26 million solar viewing glasses and other resources for 1,500 public libraries across the nation. They will serve as centers for eclipse education and viewing for their communities. The libraries will be selected through a registration process managed by the STAR Library Education Network (STAR_N ... more |
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Scientists from MIPT, the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Novosibirsk State University (NSU) have discovered that the proportion of unstable particles in the composition of dark matter in the days immediately after the Big Bang was no more than 2%-5%. Their study has been published in Physical Review D. "The discrepancy between the cosmological ... more |
In a paper published in the journal Nature, the ALPHA collaboration reports the first ever measurement on the optical spectrum of an antimatter atom. This achievement features technological developments that open up a completely new era in high-precision antimatter research. It is the result of over 20 years of work by the CERN antimatter community. "Using a laser to observe a transition i ... more |
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