January 2019
Engineering six-hour solar eclipses with formation flying
.... The OSC is responsible for performing the high accuracy actuation formation control using cold gas milli-Newton thrusters. The CSC is designed to point its coronagraph instrument towards the Sun on a continuous basis. CSC wet...
April 2019
LISA Pathfinder – paving the way for future studies of the gravitational universe
... acted as a shield around them, protecting them from external sources. It manoeuvred around them using tiny micro-newton thrusters to oppose solar radiation pressure and the solar wind of particles, sensing the test mass motion...
June 2019
Does the speed of light change with time?
... gravity have no separate existence from matter”. This elegant statement leads to a very simple equation: GM=tc3, where G is Newton’s gravitational constant, M and t are mass and age of the universe, and c is the speed of light. According to this...
August 2019
Reinventing the space museum
... depicting the cosmos, a great hall filled with paintings, drawings and artefacts of Kepler, Brahe, Galileo and Newton, and another filled with Islamic astronomy artefacts, and so on. In the more contemporary section, you might start...
July 2020
Key technologies for space exploration
..., the company has developed and tested engines of this type that develop thrust levels from about 5 N (newtons) to about 150,000 N using several combinations of fuels and oxidisers. The goal of this research is to find the...
February 2021
Space archaeology - preserving our orbital heritage
...created. Thus, the HST could be viewed as being as significant to the history of science as Darwin’s HMS Beagle, Newton’s ‘Opticks’ treatise or Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. Given the chance, we’d do everything we could to preserve those, so why not...
