The lone remote sensing instrument for the Solar Probe+ is the Hemispheric Imager or “HI” for short. Consisting of a telescope that will make 3D images similar to medical CAT scans of the Sun’s corona, this new coronal tomography is one of the newest developments available for solar imaging, with photography performed from a moving [...]
Solar Probe+ is a heat resistant spacecraft that will plunge directly into the atmosphere of the Sun, prepared to sample the solar wind and magnetism that very little is known about—hopefully beginning its mission around 2015. With NASA making this a seven-year mission, the probe is still in pre-phase A stage with a lot [...]
With so much attention on Mars and the return to the Moon, the Sun is considered one of the last unexplored regions of the entire solar system, yet it has had a 400-year historical love-affair with hundreds of astronomers. The solar corona is one of the most important regions in space to better understand the [...]
“We are awash in chemistry data,” said Michael Hecht of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lead scientist for the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, instrument on Phoenix. “We’re trying to understand what is the chemistry of wet soil on Mars, what’s dissolved in it, how acidic or alkaline it is. With the results we [...]
The latest find on Mars is showing adequate nutrients similar to those on Earth growing asparagus, but nutrients consumed by astronauts while in space is even more newsworthy. Nothing new, as nutrition for the body’s health is highly critical for a long time with its importance in space exploration—both short and long-term—no different. The [...]
“Scepticism of robotic in-orbit servicing is wasting the space sector vast amounts of money,” said the scientists. “There are few industries which would willingly spend 100 million dollars on highly designed, long-lived hardware without the provision for repair and upgrade,” they added.
European aerospace engineers are working toward the idea of fewer astronauts and more robots [...]
Time travel is a science, and according to what we know now the laws of science to not distinguish directions of time—at least when traveling backward and forward—but since 1997 it has become a questionable thing. And even though time travel is impossible to recognize with actual scientific proof, it is a true [...]
Earlier telescopes had difficulty in detecting the Martian storms which covered the barren planet with its bright, oxidized Martian soils. Dust devils whipped apart the soil-covered plains, revealing darker, sub-surface soil—with the Martian winds making the planet much warmer as its own climate change was developing. Not related to our own greenhouse climate changes or driven [...]
Phoenix’s Chemistry Lab Put to Work “The tests we have done in our test facility during the past few days show the robotic arm can deliver the simulated Martian soil through the opening with the doors in this configuration,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead scientist for TEGA. “We plan [...]
“Astronauts report that six to eight hours of extra-vehicular activity is as exhausting as running a marathon,” said Michael Reid, head physiologist at the University of Kentucky who leads an ongoing study. “The muscle groups most affected are the hands and arms.”
The 50-year old drug N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is obviously not a new drug, already present [...]
