It seems improbable that a satellite designed to monitor polar ice sheets and floating sea ice could accurately measure a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field. But that is just what ESA’s CryoSat mission did earlier this year. This is a story of unique...
Using data from the Magellan Clay telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), astronomers have investigated a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 5824. Results of the new study, available in a paper published March 5 on the arXiv pre-print server,...
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is alarmed by the threat to ground-based astronomy posed by proposals put forward by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Reflect Orbital. SpaceX has applied to launch one million satellites to act as data centers to power artificial...
Patches of the sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a new study about these long-lived active regions, we now...
Heat shields are designed to protect the surface and cargo of a spacecraft as it enters an atmosphere. Aerospace engineers in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently observed a violently destructive difference in how...
