02 August 2017
First iodine fuelled thrusters pass critical design tests
... Launch System; Morehead State University’s Lunar IceCube and Arizona State University’s LunaH-Map missions. “The BIT-3 is critical technology that will allow small spacecraft and CubeSats to acquire high quality scientific results on interplanetary...
08 July 2015
Discovery of a five-star solar system in Ursa Major highlights mystery of proto-stellar disk fragmentation
Do five suns in the sky sound like a bit too much? Not as far as a rare star...understanding of space, other systems – came to be, there is still a fair bit of mystery surrounding the workings of proto-stellar disks and the complex processes that occur...
03 November 2015
KIC 8462852 mystery: blocked by ‘alien megastructure’ … or something more banal?
A dramatically dimming star in Cygnus is giving astronomers a bit of a headache. Amateur astronomers working at the Planet Hunters project that ... involve an “alien megastructure or not” – we are finding out about them with quite a bit of a delay.
March 2016
Rosetta – Starting from Scratch
... vicinity of a planet, and uses its gravity field for a further acceleration in its heliocentric orbit - thereby stealing a bit of the planet’s orbital energy. This makes the journey very long but at the end the spacecraft...
31 October 2018
Black hole status of the Milky Way centre confirmed with striking new data
... to measure extremely small angles in the sky with extremely high accuracy; angles that are so small, its a bit like picking out a one-euro coin on the surface of the Moon. "It’s mind-boggling to actually witness material...
August 2017
On-orbit assembly will deliver major benefits in coming decade
... information can be moved through the system, measured in bits per second. Similar to Moore’s Law for computer processor... new payload would refresh the technology and instantly increase the bit-rate of the asset. As an illustration, we again assume...
