May 2017
Recipe for success on flights to Mars
... coordinate with others so that we only had to run the kettle once or twice. Instant foods tend to be high in sodium, have a lot of wheat filler, and are generally not as tasty as what we could prepare ourselves. We were very...
November 2018
BepiColombo – a mission to explore Mercury
...MGF (Mercury Magnetometer), MPPE (Mercury Plasma Particle Experiment), PWI (Mercury Plasma Wave Instrument), MSASI (Mercury Sodium Atmosphere Spectral Imager) and MDM (Mercury Dust Monitor). The MMO is an octagonal spin-stabilised spacecraft, meaning...
January 2020
Old rocks, new tricks - a lunar link to modern volcanology
... pyroxene minerals which then slowly sank and formed the mantle. Meanwhile, plagioclase, a form of feldspar rich in sodium/calcium, floated to the top to form the crust. Later on, magma from deep in the mantle, and therefore...
October 2021
Mining lunar hydrogen
... unique metallic compounds that are not typical of terrestrial conditions (in the form of iron, aluminium, titanium, magnesium, sodium, potassium and calcium oxides). For this reason, and not coincidentally, on 6 April 2020, the President of the...
October 2024
Lunar construction with regolith and robots
... rock chemistry classifies TUBS-M as low titanium basalt and its alkali-rich nature is evident from elevated sodium oxide (Na2O) and potassium oxide (K2O) content compared to lunar samples. Figure 3. Thin section images of TUBS...
03 April 2020
Newly discovered organisms in ancient solid rock inspire new search for life
... fill up with iron-rich smectite; a type of clay mineral that contains iron and magnesium as well as either sodium or calcium and is the same clay used to make pottery. As might be expected, finding signs of ancient, tiny microbes...
