24 July 2019
LightSail 2 unfurls its sails and soars through space
...was angled to within 30 degrees of its expected orientation—a promising early sign the spacecraft is tracking the Sun properly,” The Planetary Society shared via its website. However the society also reported that, “LightSail 2 did not rise far above...
25 May 2020
Clashing galaxies may have triggered Solar System formation says new study
...as one encounter is suggested to be roughly coincident with the time of the formation of the Sun some 4.7 billion years ago. “The Sun formed at the time when stars were forming in the Milky Way because of the first passage of Sagittarius,” says Carme...
June 2017
Bepi-Colombo will unveil Mercury’s secrets
... Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), had noticed that the period of the spacecraft’s orbit around the Sun, after it flew past Mercury, would be almost exactly twice the period of the planet itself, so the spacecraft and the planet would meet again and, with...
May 2018
PLATO the habitable zone explorer
... possible from space. Kepler stared for four years at the same patch of sky, while K2, an ingenious extension of the Kepler mission using the radiation pressure from the Sun to stabilise the satellite, is only able to carry out short-duration stares...
January 2019
Visiting an asteroid to find out how life began
... first, operations will pause as the Sun will get in the way. Solar conjunction occurs when the Sun moves between Ryugu and the Earth, interfering with communication with the spacecraft. From the end of November to the end of December, communication...
August 2018
Flying to the stars
... distances involved. Imagine for a moment that the distance between our Sun and the Earth is one metre. The Sun would be the size of a grain of salt on this scale. Still, the closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, would be more than 265 km away...
