March 2015
Chasing comets together: the Vega project in the USSR and beyond
... 76-year-long orbit passes through the centre of our solar system. Prior to this, the USSR considered a joint...-scale model of the standalone small station (SSS) with deployed solar panels. It was developed for the Phobos mission One of the possible...
June 2015
Finding asteroids before they find us
...the sun will let it generate twice as much power from its solar panels as it would in Earth’s orbit. Three tiers of sunshades ...only possible by governments. Mapping the great unknown of the inner solar system is one of those missions – and it is the ...
April 2017
Urgent action needed to keep satellites safe in orbit
... a complex system involving numerous subsystems that have finite lifetimes due to mechanical wearing (e.g. Sun-tracking solar panel bearings, momentum wheels, etc.), limited propulsion resources (gas jets or similar), and carefully engineered thermal...
23 August 2016
NASA Makes Contact with STEREO-B Spacecraft
.... Credit: NASA STEREO-A and STEREO-B spacecraft (Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory Spacecraft) were launched in ... which in turn would have caused problems with its power-generating solar panels. It is yet unclear if STEREO-B will be able to ...
22 September 2017
OSIRIS-REx makes closest Earth approach today
... be selected from the 500, 000 known asteroids out in the Solar System. Benny is carbon-rich (where the b comes from in ...from Cape Canaveral, Florida, OSIRIS-Rex has already unfolded its solar panels in the first step of its mission. After its gravity...
14 January 2019
New steam-powered asteroid hopper that could run 'forever'
...each object to make it work. It can for instance deploy solar panels to get enough energy for mining and make steam, or for ...warm while they carried out their mission objectives. With a Solar System doomed to be littered by defunct robots no longer ...
