January 2017
New oceans beckon for solar sail technology
...appropriate for target environments can be developed. The NEA Scout, scheduled to launch in 2018, will use its solar sail propulsion system to send the spacecraft to flyby asteroid 1991VG and conduct reconnaissance of it (Figure 2). Figure 2 - Artist...
February 2016
Searching for water in the Solar System
... July 2015. At the core of this question is the abundance of volatile-rich planetesimals migrated from the outer Solar System (ie, beyond Jupiter). Observations of increasing abundance of C-type asteroids across the main belt inferred from telescopic...
10 August 2018
Fiery inferno awaits NASA's Parker Solar Probe
... with four instrument suites designed to study plasma, magnetic fields, energetic particles, and image the solar wind. The Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons investigation, or SWEAP, will gather data on the most abundant particles...
31 May 2017
NASA to 'touch the Sun' with Parker Solar Probe
... Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Nonetheless, as a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences estimated that a huge solar event could cause two trillion dollars in damage in the US alone without any prior warning, data collected...
25 January 2017
"Extinct" meteorite challenges our understanding of how the solar system formed
...our current understanding of the history and development of the solar system, due to the rare and unknown minerals contained ...unknown but of fundamental importance in the history of the solar system occurred nearly 500 million years ago to change the ...
10 May 2016
When sunspots are minimal, the solar magnetic field is at a maximum, say researchers
... by a team of international researchers, has revealed that during times of its grand minimum phase - a period of unusually low solar activity – the Sun’s magnetic field is actually at a maximum and that it may hide at the bottom of the convection...
