January 2017
New oceans beckon for solar sail technology
... National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has expressed interest in placing a long-duration solar storm warning spacecraft closer to the Sun, yet always between the Earth and Sun, so as to enable rapid warning of an impending solar...
March 2017
Rosetta – outstanding climax to pioneering mission
...a planned ‘excursion’ to study the coma structure at distances up to 1500 km from the nucleus, we started to gradually decrease the spacecraft distance to the surface, and by the end of 2015 we were back to closed orbits. This explained the 18-minute...
June 2017
Bepi-Colombo will unveil Mercury’s secrets
... of Mercury. It was therefore necessary to devise an intricate design of curved mirrors that will discard heat generated by the spacecraft, while simultaneously deflecting the heat coming from the planet. Onwards and upwards Although many issues...
September 2017
Measuring space debris risk
... flat at 500 in any given year in the range. Therefore, we have 10 ‘serious anomaly’ debris strikes on 5,000 available spacecraft overall in this 10-year period. This gives us a ‘ballpark’ serious historical anomaly rate of one in 500 satellites per...
July 2018
The rise of interplanetary CubeSats
.... Engineer Joel Steinkraus uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Interplanetary challenges Interplanetary CubeSats, thanks to their low-cost, could perform highrisk...
August 2018
Flying to the stars
... needs to have an average velocity of about eight percent of the speed of light. To give an indication of how fast this is, a spacecraft at eight percent of the speed of light would take about 15 seconds to cross the distance between the Earth...
