The moon rises through clouds over the skyline of lower Manhattan in this view from West Orange, N.J., Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023. The first of two supermoons in August graced…
Category: Planetary Science
Two intermediate polars investigated by astronomers
TESS light curve of Swift J0939.7-3224 spanning 24 days. Credit: Rawat et al, 2023 By analyzing the long-term, high-cadence continuous photometry from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have…
Optimizing heat exchange flow in microgravity
Interior of CM-HT test section: Test fluid (normal perfluoro hexane or nPFH) is vaporized and pumped through the steel tube embedded in an insulating material section at the entrance and…
European wind-mapping satellite returned safely to Earth
Credit: ESA A European wind-mapping satellite has returned successfully to Earth following a delicate assisted return designed to minimize damage from flying debris, the European Space Agency said on Saturday.…
Two supermoons in August mean double the stargazing fun
A commercial airliner flies Northwest across Lake Michigan in front of the “Full Buck” supermoon, the first of four supermoons in 2023, July 3, 2023, in Chicago. The cosmos is…
Astronomers shed new light on formation of mysterious fast radio bursts
The Chinese Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). Credit: Bojun Wang, Jinchen Jiang & Qisheng Cui More than 15 years after the discovery of fast radio bursts (FRBs)—millisecond-long, deep-space cosmic…
Need to image an asteroid close up? There’s an AMIGO for that
Artist’s depiction of a fully inflated AMIGO. Credit: Schwatz et al. There are so many asteroids. Just in our own backyard, we’ve found over 30,000 Near Earth asteroids. Exploring them…
A gamma ray burst lasted so long it triggered a satellite twice
An artist’s depiction of a gamma-ray burst’s relativistic jet full of very-high-energy photons breaking out of a collapsing star. Credit: DESY, Science Communication Lab Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the…
Orbiting astronaut oversees robot team on Earth
The Rollin’ Justin robot in DLR’s planetary surface test environment at the Agency’s German Space Operations Center in Operpfaffenhofen near Munich, used for the Surface Avatar test on 24 July…
Was Olympus Mons once a giant volcanic island?
Olympus Mons: a volcanic island in the middle of a vanished Martian ocean. Credit: A.Hildenbrand/Geops/CNRS (produced from MOLA public data) Imagine a volcanic island about the size of France and…
