April 2024
Terraformal dreaming
... hour, leaving an atmospheric haze in their wake for days or even weeks. And to top it all off, there’s no magnetosphere, so the Red Planet is constantly bombarded by carcinogenic solar and galactic radiation. The second test flight of SpaceX...
May 2024
Beyond Earth’s magnetic field
... the International Space Station (ISS) is in low Earth orbit, where cosmonauts and astronauts are protected by Earth’s magnetosphere. However, the exploration of deep space, including flights to the Moon and Mars, imply going beyond its...
January 2021
Evolution of volatiles on the Moon
... of the volatiles in our solar system. To understand how this occurred we have to start at the beginning. The lunar magnetosphere protecting its tenuous atmosphere from the solar wind and allowing Earth’s early atmosphere a pathway to be deposited...
November 2018
BepiColombo – a mission to explore Mercury
...Planetary Orbiter (MPO), a three-axis stabilised and nadir pointing spacecraft, and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), a spinning spacecraft carrying a payload of five experiments and instruments. Together, the two make up BepiColombo...
October 2017
Exploring Jupiter’s icy moons
... will be elucidated. Within Jupiter’s satellite system, JUICE will also study the moons’ interactions with the magnetosphere, gravitational coupling and long-term tidal evolution of the Galilean satellites. At Ganymede, the mission will characterise...
March 2018
Plumes on Europa - tasting an extra-terrestrial ocean
...Noise’ generated from the high energy electrons in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, for example, is likely to penetrate the instruments and...that create H2O+; the high energy plasma in Jupiter’s magnetosphere causes the release of H2O from Europa’s surface ice...
