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...
March 2016
Saving Earth from an Expanding Sun
... of the Golidlocks zone. This is why only a little bit of carbon dioxide generated by human industry is causing problems. ... Earth - and maybe pull it upward A shade parasol, established a bit sunward of the L1 Lagrangian point, ~1.5 X 109 m sun-ward ...
March 2015
Twinkle, twinkle satellite
... silicon heart / Warmed to the sight of a billion candles burning / Oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning.” I understand the message, of course. It’s a bit cheesy and self-congratulatory as far as the Western perspective goes, but the song was also written...
