One year ago, Caltech's Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) launched into space to demonstrate and test three technological innovations that are among those necessary to make space solar power a reality.
Space Exploration
Jan 17, 2024
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12
When our sun was a young star, 4.56 billion years ago, what is now our solar system was just a disk of rocky dust and gas. Over tens of millions of years, tiny dust pebbles coalesced, like a snowball rolling larger and larger, ...
Astronomy
Jan 9, 2024
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56
The chemical industry has long been shadowed by unwelcome images of billowing smokestacks and pipes discharging toxic effluent. Modern manufacturing practices have done much to mitigate the industry's environmental impact, ...
Analytical Chemistry
Jan 5, 2024
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59
For decades, science fiction authors have imagined scenarios in which life thrives on the harsh surfaces of Mars or our moon, or in the oceans below the icy surfaces of Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa. But ...
Astronomy
Dec 29, 2023
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150
As part of a plan to prepare for the quantity and range of data that will be coming in from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, currently scheduled to launch by May 2027, NASA has granted funding to five project infrastructure ...
Astronomy
Dec 20, 2023
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90
When we last checked in with Caltech's Kerry Vahala three years ago, his lab had recently reported the development of a new optical device called a turnkey frequency microcomb that has applications in digital communications, ...
Optics & Photonics
Dec 8, 2023
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27
For about 20 years, Caltech Professor of Applied Physics Paul Bellan and his group have been creating magnetically accelerated jets of plasma, an electrically conducting gas composed of ions and electrons, in a vacuum chamber ...
Plasma Physics
Dec 5, 2023
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21
In the search for new particles and forces in nature, physicists are on the hunt for behaviors within atoms and molecules that are forbidden by the tried-and-true Standard Model of particle physics. Any deviations from this ...
General Physics
Nov 29, 2023
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1857
Caulerpa is a type of marine algae made up of one extended cell, though each plant can grow to be a meter across. While there are many individual nuclei within a Caulerpa plant, it contains no cell membranes that would normally ...
Cell & Microbiology
Nov 24, 2023
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41
The core–mantle boundary (CMB) is the interface between the Earth's iron metal core and the thick rocky layer of mantle just above the core. It is a world of extremes—temperatures thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and pressures ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 17, 2023
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300
