October 2015
Taking AIM with ESA: proposing the first visit to a binary asteroid system
.... Indeed, this might be the origin of many binary asteroid systems, which form 15% of the known total. And photon pressure on an irregular asteroid body can induce rotational torque – known as the ‘Yarkovsky/YORP effect’. The micro...
September 2017
Telescope targets enigmatic deep space mystery
... a model for the average electron density as a function of redshift, enables one to measure the time of flight of the photon, and hence the path length. In this sense, FRBs represent cosmic rulers. Mysteries surrounding FRBs The...
August 2019
Lessons from the Sun
... radio monitors saw readings go off the charts and the first ever recorded gamma-ray flare photons were detected. Within a few minutes, in-orbit X-ray sensors saturated and military radio communications blacked out...
May 2022
Essential guide to the James Webb Space Telescope
... in the infrared. Additionally, their host stars are comparatively dimmer in the infrared, making picking up elusive photons from exoplanets much easier at these longer wavelengths. Finally, as beautifully illustrated by Hubble, shorter-wavelength...
June 2022
Patent protection for space manufacturing
... spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rideshare mission planned for early 2023. Rocket Lab is to build and jointly operate multiple Photon Spacecraft for Varda, supporting its 120 kg manufacturing and re-entry modules with power, data, and attitude...
June 2022
Sunshades in space could help alleviate Earth’s climate crisis
... have yielded basic results on minimum mass constraints, control laws for propellant-less station-keeping using photon pressure, trajectories for deployment to the SEL-1 region, and several potential architectures for how a sunshade would...
