June 2015
Ultimate sunbather: NASA and ESA collaborate on Solar Orbiter
... on-orbit contamination analysis and predictions. A number of the instruments are designed to monitor the magnetic field of the Sun and so they need to be protected from any magnetic fields generated by the spacecraft. The spacecraft electronics and...
October 2015
Finding Earth-like worlds: the tale of how Kepler-452b was discovered
...like Earth - a rocky world in a one-year orbit around a Sun-like star. Rather than just give up, we thought, “Well, let... Every 90 days, to keep the solar arrays pointing at the Sun, we rotated the spacecraft by 90 degrees. During these manoeuvres, the...
November 2018
BepiColombo – a mission to explore Mercury
...can help scientists understand how Earth was formed, how it evolved, and how it interacts with the Sun. Therefore, in order to understand Mercury, BepiColombo will address a comprehensive set of scientific questions in order to gain further knowledge...
March 2015
Dawn of ion propulsion
...to lower levels now that Dawn is much farther from the Sun, the spacecraft will have accumulated about 5.5 years of total... of paper Three years ago, the spacecraft’s path around the sun was exactly the same as Vesta’s. Achieving that perfect match was...
19 May 2021
Scientists unexpectedly find heavy metal vapour in comets throughout our Solar System, and beyond
... in the cores of comets are metals. These are not usually seen, especially not far from the Sun, as solid metals don’t usually “sublimate” (become gaseous) at low temperatures. However, in a new study by a Belgian team using...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
... to explore in our Solar System with smaller spacecraft? The Sun is an obvious target, since we can cost-effectively send ..., including its interaction with the solar wind. Observing our Sun The Sun is a massive, roiling, dynamic object at the centre ...
