Asteroid exploration has been all the rage lately, and the European Space Agency (ESA) isn’t missing out on the fun.
On February 4, ESA released new details about its upcoming Hera mission — the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid. The mission will launch to asteroid 65803 Didymos, a binary pair made up of one large body and a smaller object that orbits around it, in 2023. Aptly nicknamed Didymoon, the smaller of the two stretches just&nb ...read more
While New Horizons is exploring new targets, researchers are still working on the mountains of data it returned in 2015 from its visit to Pluto and its moon Charon. Charon is Pluto's largest companion, and like Pluto, it has a complicated, icy surface dotted with mountains and canyons. Large parts of Charon's surface appear to have been resurfaced in the past, leading to theories of an underground ocean that could have erupted long ago.
New Horizons’ best views of Charon were of its side ...read more
Trying to model what the cascading impact of anthropogenic climate change might be around the world is challenging to say the least. This isn't a simple relationship where global average temperature goes up and everything changes in concert. As we've seen in the United States with the Polar Vortex, a warmer average global climate can also mean much colder short-term weather as typical patterns are perturbed by the chain of events caused by warming. So, as the dominoes fall in a changing glob ...read more
(Inside Science) -- Researchers from Japan have come up with a way to encourage materials to grow stronger over time, like the muscles in our body. The new technique could allow engineers to design adaptable and healable materials for a wide range of applications.
When we lift weights in the gym, the mechanical stress causes our muscle fibers to rip and tear, but this damaging action actually allows the fibers to regrow stronger afterwards. In contrast, nonliving materials such as rubber ...read more
Thanks to a mashup of science and industry, researchers have developed a prototype spacecraft that can mine water from an asteroid, use that water to generate steam, then use that steam as fuel to hop across the surface of an asteroid — or even jump to an entirely different world altogether.
The prototype spacecraft — named The World Is Not Enough (WINE) — was largely developed by Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California, with plenty of help from planetary ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine