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26/06/2023

SpaceX engineers still class Thursday's mission as a success. They like to "test early and often" and are not afraid to break things. They will have gathered a mass of data to work towards the next flight. A second Starship is almost ready to take flight.

"Congrats team on an exciting test launch of Starship! Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months," Mr Musk tweeted.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses rocket launches in the US, said it would oversee a mishap investigation. A spokesman said this was standard practice when a vehicle was lost in flight.

15/06/2023

Just weeks after making the closest ever flyby of the Sun, Nasa's Parker Solar Probe is sending back its data.

Included in the observations is this remarkable image of the energetic gas, or plasma, flowing out from the star.

The bright dot is actually Mercury. The black dots are repeats of the little world that occur simply because of the way the picture is constructed.

Parker's WISPR instrument acquired the vista just 27.2 million km from the surface of the Sun on 8 November.

The imager was looking out sideways from behind the probe's thick heat shield.

08/06/2023

A Chinese robot has started exploring the far side of the Moon.

The Chang'e-4 probe will explore the surface and carry out geological experiments. China plans to follow this up with further missions to return Moon rock to laboratories on Earth.

But it's not just scientists who are fascinated with the Moon's hidden face.

Musicians, film-makers and, of course, conspiracy theorists have all been inspired by that secret, barren landscape.

02/06/2023

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2 will attempt to collect a sample of rock from an asteroid on 22 February, the country's space agency (Jaxa) says.

Hayabusa 2 reached asteroid Ryugu in June 2018 after a three-and-a-half-year journey from Earth.

It will descend to the surface and attempt to grab the sample from a pre-chosen site.

The spacecraft will return to Earth with the samples in 2020 after its exploration of Ryugu is complete.

Jaxa officials had to delay the touchdown last October, after they found the asteroid's surface was more rugged than expected.

24/05/2023

To the lay person, it's actually hard to tell the difference. But the telescope mirrors inside this copy, for example, are unpolished spares, and its "scientific instruments" don't contain the full complement of components and electronics.

An STM is, nonetheless, a very good representation.

Its job is to run ahead of the FM in the assembly process to find and fix any issues that might arise in the use of materials and the integration of equipment.

"I've seen many Structural and Thermal Models in my career and I think this is the most beautiful because it's actually nearly all made from flight hardware," Giuseppe Racca, Esa Euclid project manager, told BBC News.

18/05/2023

They considered the possibility that CO2 or water (H2O) molecules released oxygen when they broke apart in the atmosphere, leading to a short-lived rise. But it would take five times more water than there actually is to produce the additional oxygen, and CO2 breaks up too slowly to generate it over such a short time.

"We know oxygen is created and destroyed on Mars through the energy provided by sunlight breaking down CO2 and H2O, both of which are observed in the atmosphere of Mars. The thing that doesn't make sense is the size of the variation - it doesn't match what we expect to see," Dr Manish Patel, from the Open University - who was not involved with the study, told BBC News.

"Given that Curiosity makes measurements at the surface of Mars, it is tempting to think that this is coming from the surface - but we have no evidence for that. Geologically-speaking, it seems unlikely - I can't think of a process that would fit."

15/05/2023

The Airbus engineers are confident, however. They have just completed construction of Esa's ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover, which will be heading to Mars in July on a separate mission. They'll take the lessons learned from that vehicle into the development of the fetch rover, follow-on contracts from Esa permitting.

"We've got a wealth of experience here in Stevenage," said engineering manager Adam Camilletti.

"We've learned about how to design mechanisms, structures, electronics, overall systems, software autonomy - for working on Mars. We know the Martian environment; we know how to make things robust. And so we're going to use all that experience and expertise to make sure that 'Sample Fetch Rover' is an optimal design," he told BBC News.

05/05/2023

The concept involves heating the soil so oxygen within it reacts with added hydrogen - to create water.

"Water is one of the most critical resources we need for space exploration - not just for the life support needs of humans but also to make rocket fuel," said Ms Sargeant.

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28/04/2023

While the coronavirus crisis has meant considerable disruption for many space projects, Cheops has been largely unaffected.

"The completion of the test phase was only possible with the full commitment of all the participants, and because the mission has an operational control system that is largely automated, allowing commands to be sent and data to be received from home," said Prof W***y Benz from the University of Bern and principal investigator on the mission.

Cheops is a short form that stands for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite.

25/04/2023

Earth has three poles at the top of the planet. A geographic pole which is where the planet's rotation axis intersects the surface. The geomagnetic pole is the location which best fits a classic dipole (its position alters little). And then there is the North Magnetic, or dip, Pole, which is where field lines are perpendicular to the surface.

It is this third pole that has been doing all the movement.

When first identified by explorer James Clark Ross in the 1830s, it was in Canada's Nunavut territory.

19/04/2023

The Crew Dragon is equipped with 16 Draco thrusters that manoeuvre the vehicle in orbit. Each Draco is capable of producing 90 pounds of force in the vacuum of space.

If anything goes wrong during lift-off, the capsule has a launch escape system (LES) consisting of eight SuperDraco engines that each produce 16,000 pounds of force. The LES quickly separates Crew Dragon from its rocket.

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17/04/2023

Mars is at its biggest and brightest right now as the Red Planet lines up with Earth on the same side of the Sun.

Every 26 months, the pair take up this arrangement, moving close together, before then diverging again on their separate orbits around our star.

Tuesday night sees the actual moment of what astronomers call "opposition".

All three bodies will be in a straight line at 23:20 GMT (00:20 BST).

14/04/2023

On Thursday, scientists gave an update on how its survey is progressing.

So far, Gaia has plotted the precise positions of more than 1.8 billion stars; and for most of these, it also knows their exact distance from Earth and their movement across the sky.

Launched in 2013, the telescope still has four years of work ahead of it.

But even now, this "discovery machine" is pumping out new insights on the cosmos at an incredible rate. Every day, something like three scholarly papers are published based on its data.

Nothing matches it for productivity, not even the mighty Hubble observatory.

"Gaia data is like a tsunami rolling through astrophysics," said Prof Martin Barstow from the University of Leicester, UK.

12/04/2023

Space agency officials released sample data on Thursday to illustrate the progress in commissioning Sentinel-6 and its main observation payload, an altimeter.

This is an instrument that fires microwave pulses down to Earth and then counts the time it takes to receive the return signal, converting this into an elevation.

Normally, the data is presented as a "waveform", in which the power of the return signal traces sea surface height and roughness (wave height and wind speed).

10/04/2023

The first large sample of rock and soil from an asteroid is making its way back to Earth.

A capsule containing the material was released by Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on Saturday morning (GMT), as it approached our planet.

The sample container should deploy parachutes and land in the Australian outback this evening.

Hayabusa-2 grabbed the cosmic treasure trove from Ryugu, one of the primitive building blocks of our Solar System.

These objects are relics from billions of years ago, when the Earth was still forming. But they continued to roam, never becoming incorporated into planets.

05/04/2023

"If they fail at very low altitudes, they'll come back down on their own; but if satellites fail at 1,200-1,300km in altitude - they'll be up there for centuries with the risk that they start to break up, collide with other objects and make the debris situation much, much worse."

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03/04/2023

China's remote-controlled rover, which landed on Mars a week ago, has driven down from its landing platform to the surface of the planet.

This makes China the second country after the US to operate a rover there.

The Zhurong robot is due to study the planet's surface rocks and atmosphere. It will also look for signs of life, including any subsurface water or ice.

China's Tianwen-1 mission, consisting of an orbiter, lander and rover, was launched in July last year.

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The deputy chief commander of the mission, Zhang Yuhua, said the rover was designed to operate for 92 Earth days (or 90 Mars days, known as "sols", which are slightly longer than Earth days) and would share its data via the orbiter.

31/03/2023

Today, more than 40 years after setting out on their grand adventure, these sentinels have traversed, in the case of Voyager 1, some 23 billion km; or 155 times the Sun-Earth distance, a separation scientists refer to as the Astronomical Unit to keep the numbers manageable.

The Voyagers have told us new things about the galactic environment in which our Sun lives, but that wasn't their primary goal. They were originally conceived to survey the outer planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus - which they completed in spectacular fashion. Their late career move was just a bonus.

29/03/2023

A Dundee zoo said a decision to euthanise four of its wolves following the death of their pack leader was done as a last resort.

Camperdown Wildlife Centre put alpha male wolf Loki to sleep after he developed complications following an operation.

It said the other four wolves exhibited "unusually anxious and abnormal behaviour" following Loki's operation.

The zoo said its team were "absolutely heartbroken" at the decision.

It had faced criticism from some commentators on its social media accounts following the announcement, with one calling the decision "extreme."

28/03/2023

A planetarium is among proposals designed to boost tourism in Powys.

Welsh Water is hoping to develop the theatre for learning about astronomy and the night sky at its Elan Valley Visitor Centre near Rhayader.

The company revealed its plans as it officially reopened the Devil's Gulch path in the Elan Valley, which was closed by a rockfall five years ago.

It is bidding for funding via the Mid Wales Growth Deal.

Under this scheme, the Welsh and UK governments provide half the start-up cash to raise the fortunes of Powys and Ceredigion.

27/03/2023

Perseverance has spent most of its first three weeks on Mars going through post-landing checks. It has, though, started driving in a north-easterly direction.

An immediate goal is a helicopter experiment. The rover brought a small chopper with it from Earth.

The vehicle is looking for a suitable stretch of terrain where the 2kg device, called Ingenuity, can be put safely on the ground. At present, the aircraft is slung beneath Perseverance's belly.

23/03/2023

The team selects specific targets from a database before capturing them.

CaSSIS flies over the surface at about 3km/s, so the images have to be taken very quickly. The exposure time for the images is only 1.5ms.

"We get around 4.5m per pixel on the surface from a distance of about 400 km - so it is a little like looking at a bus in London from Liverpool," Prof Thomas explains.

The camera uses false-colour imagery to enrich its findings.

21/03/2023

A sword, axe heads and rare decorative beads made of amber and gold are among Bronze Age objects returning to the Western Isles on loan.

The items were uncovered during peat digging in the 19th and 20th centuries in the Ness area of Lewis.

The sword's blade is still reasonably sharp even after 3,000 years buried in the ground.

The objects are in held in the care of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, but are being released on loan to Ness museum Comunn Eachdraidh Nis for a new exhibition opening on 18 April.

20/03/2023

Prof Greaves' team first identified phosphine at Venus using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, and then confirmed its presence using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile.

Phosphine has a distinctive "absorption line" that these radio telescopes discern at a wavelength of about 1mm. The gas is observed at mid-latitudes on the planet at roughly 50-60km in altitude. The concentration is small - making up only 10-20 parts in every billion atmospheric molecules - but in this context, that's a lot.

17/03/2023

Pluto's atmosphere was believed to be too thin to create the features familiar in deserts on Earth.

The findings come from analysis of the startling images sent back by Nasa's New Horizons mission, which flew close to Pluto in July 2015.

After an epic trek through the Solar System that took nearly a decade, New Horizons sped by at a speed of 58,536 km/h (36,373 mph), gathering data as it passed.

In their study, the researchers explain how they studied pictures of a plain known as Sputnik Planitia, parts of which are covered with what look like fields of dunes.

16/03/2023

"I think the general impression had been that these planets just didn't exist, but we couldn't be sure because small stars are very faint, which makes them difficult to study, even though they are much more common than stars like the Sun," he told BBC News.

Researchers used telescopes in Spain and the US to track gravitational accelerations of the star that might be caused by planets orbiting it.

The red dwarf has a larger mass than its orbiting planet - named GJ 3512b. But the difference in their size is much smaller than it is between, say, the Sun and Jupiter.

15/03/2023

The US-European Cassini mission promised to resolve the argument in its last months at the gas giant.

The satellite's end days saw it fly repeatedly through the gap between the rings and the planet's cloudtops.

These manoeuvres made possible unprecedented gravity measurements.

Cassini essentially weighed the rings, and found their mass to be 20 times smaller than previous estimates: something on the order of 15,400,000,000,000,000 tonnes, or about two-fifths the mass of Mimas - the Saturn moon that looks like the "Death Star" weapon in the Star Wars movies.

14/03/2023

According to Shriharsh Tendulkar, an astronomer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, this is one of the main theories, but the scenario only works for cosmic signals that are only seen once, as the stars are destroyed in the process.

"It's a cataclysmic event - it doesn't work for fast radio burst repeaters," he says.

Most of the fast radio bursts picked up by telescopes in the last decade or so are seen once then disappear.

Yet, two elusive signals have been found that burst into life again and again - and for these, there must be a different explanation.

14/03/2023

The latest edition of the journal Nature has a number of studies looking at the state of the continent and how it might change in a warming world.

One of these papers, led by US and German scientists, examines the possible reaction of the bedrock as the great mass of ice above it thins. It should lift up - something scientists call isostatic readjustment.

New evidence suggests where this process has occurred in the past, it can actually constrain ice losses - as the land rises, it snags on the floating fronts of marine-terminating glaciers.

13/03/2023

The Forum mission will carry a spectrometer to sense the far-infrared radiation coming up off the Earth.

It's in this long wavelength portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that water vapour and carbon dioxide absorb energy very efficiently, warming the planet in the process.

Remarkably, it's not a region that has been mapped extensively before.

This means scientists are missing a number of key features in their climate models, including the detailed workings of some of the feedbacks in the planet's atmosphere that amplify or mitigate warming.

These omissions would include the behaviour of certain types of cloud.

13/03/2023

Scientists hope the probe will tell them more about solar wind, which is basically charged-up particles called plasma that are chucked out from the Sun and escape its strong gravitational pull, before racing across the Solar System.

They already know that solar wind accelerates to supersonic speeds as it moves through the Sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona - but they don't know how. So, by sending the probe into the corona itself, it is hoped they will find some answers to this.

08/03/2023

The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov was detected in our Solar System last year.

This mysterious visitor from the depths of space has provided astronomers with an unprecedented opportunity to compare it to comets that formed around the Sun.

New data suggests it contains large amounts of carbon monoxide - a possible clue to where it was "born".

The findings appear in two separate scientific papers published by Nature Astronomy.

In one of the papers, an international team led by Martin Cordiner and Stefanie Milam from the US space agency's (Nasa) Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, pointed the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Alma) toward the comet on 15 and 16 December 2019.

07/03/2023

Scientists have long recognised a sudden brightening from this system that occurs twice every 12 years. The outburst of energy is equivalent to a trillion suns turning on at once in the holes' host galaxy.

The best explanation for this extraordinary behaviour is that the smaller object is routinely crashing through a disc of gas and dust that's accreting on to its larger companion, heating the inspiraling material to extremely high temperatures in the process.

But this flaring is somewhat irregular. Sometimes the brightening episodes in the 12-year period occur as little as one year apart; other times, as much as 10 years apart.

06/03/2023

Scientists now think they have an answer: much of it became trapped in the planet's outer layer - its crust.

The ancient water exists in the form of minerals contained within Martian rocks.

The findings have been discussed at the 52nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference and are published in Science journal.

The study used measurements gathered from Mars-orbiting spacecraft, rovers and meteorites.

Researchers then developed a computer simulation of how water was lost from the planet over time.

03/03/2023

Many of the first stars were quite different to our own Sun. They were more massive and burned only hydrogen. But these objects created the next generation of stars that led to the formation of heavier periodic table elements.

Everything except for hydrogen, helium and lithium, is created inside stars when they explode at the end of their lives.

We are, therefore, ultimately made from the stars that were born close to the dawn of the cosmos.

"Because we are ourselves the produce of stellar evolution, we are looking back at our own origin," said Prof Ellis.

The researchers analysed starlight from the galaxies using both Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope. They estimated the age of the galaxies by examining the proportion of hydrogen atoms in the atmosphere of their stars. The older the stars, the greater the proportion of hydrogen atoms.

27/02/2023

The South of Scotland Golden Eagle Project (SSGEP) has been named Scottish project of the year in the National Lottery awards.

It was set up five years ago to help ensure the survival of the iconic species in the area.

The work - which sees birds relocated from the Highlands - has seen numbers rise from just a handful to nearly 40.

Project manager, Dr Cat Barlow, said things had been progressing well.

20/02/2023

Free tickets have been made available for advance booking, which have all been taken up for the first week of the exhibition.

But on-the-day walk-in tickets are also available, said Ms Nugent.

Museum officials said they were expecting high demand during Easter.

It is hoped the exhibit will also bring a boost to the city centre economy.

"We know from previous venues that Dippy has a huge impact on the visitor economy in every city where it's been to, so we're really excited about the potential to drive more footfall to the city and really show off the city," Ms Nugent added.

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