September 2017
Binary stars and their extraordinary lives
...for measuring the masses of stars, as discovered by Kepler and Newton in the 17th century. Their orbital properties, such as period... today as they were in the 17th century to Kepler and Newton. They can be used to measure the expansion rate of the...
January 2017
New oceans beckon for solar sail technology
... it imparts approximately twice the momentum as absorption. The physics of solar sail propulsion is relatively easy to understand. Newton’s Second Law of Motion says that Force is equal to mass times acceleration. The force (F) of sunlight at a given...
May 2021
Dream big and reach the stars
...’s leaders. Every generation follows in the footsteps of those before them and then advances their field; as Isaac Newton wrote in a 1675 letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants...
August 2018
Flying to the stars
...power plant or nuclear plant) only generates a force of a few newtons. One newton is the force that acts on your hand when it holds a... to be very small, on the order of micro or nano newtons (less than the weight of a human hair). This requires very...
December 2014
India joins the major league with the Mars Orbiter Mission
... failed, an alternative method (Plan B) would have been activated, which meant using only the spacecraft’s eight 22 Newton thrusters. However, as ISRO chairman Koppillil Radhakrishnan put it, this would merely have been a “salvaging exercise”. Then...
March 2016
Gravitational waves provide new window on the universe
...our planet, is defined by the laws developed by Sir Isaac Newton. However, in space those laws cannot be applied anymore. The ...inspiral, is calculated using post-Newtonian theory. It uses Newton’s laws, and step-by-step adds in different hypotheses to...
