05 October 2020
A dozen "superhabitable" planets better than Earth identified in new study
... 24 "superhabitable" exoplanets that are potentially better than our own. As a warm, temperate world at a favourable distance from the Sun, and with an abundance of liquid water on its surface, Earth is a planet like no other that we know of so far...
March 2015
Dawn of ion propulsion
...spacecraft, and this is the source of ion propulsion’s extraordinary efficacy. North is at the top of this figure and the sun is far to the left. Ceres orbital motion around the sun carries it straight into the figure. The original approach took Dawn...
June 2015
Finding asteroids before they find us
... to explore ways to deflect or destroy threatening asteroids. As asteroids orbit the Sun and the Earth orbits the Sun, our aim was to find the most cost-effective way to change the orbit of the asteroid ever so slightly, just to set it off course and...
November 2018
BepiColombo – a mission to explore Mercury
... nearly perpendicular to Mercury’s orbital plane around the Sun, ensuring that the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the spacecraft are never Sun-pointed. Each of the eight side panels is fitted with solar cells, with the areas not covered equipped instead with...
