On May 20, 2021, the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission achieved an important milestone, passing NASA's Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of its spacecraft and payload experiments. Southwest Research ...
Space Exploration
May 25, 2021
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Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity.
Astronomy
May 10, 2021
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When the four-decades-old Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, scientists celebrated. These plucky spacecraft had already traveled 120 times the distance from the Earth ...
Astronomy
Apr 26, 2021
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In October 2017, humanity caught its first-ever glimpse of an interstellar object—a visitor from beyond our solar system—passing nearby the sun. We named it "Oumuamua, and its unusual properties fascinated and confounded ...
Astronomy
Apr 19, 2021
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17
Eleven billion miles away—more than four times the distance from us to Pluto—lies the boundary of our solar system's magnetic bubble, the heliopause. Here the Sun's magnetic field, stretching through space like an invisible ...
Astronomy
Apr 16, 2021
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New observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) indicate that the rogue comet 2I/Borisov, which is only the second and most recently detected interstellar visitor to our Solar System, ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2021
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Much of the carbon in space is believed to exist in the form of large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Since the 1980s, circumstantial evidence has indicated that these molecules are abundant in space, ...
Astronomy
Mar 18, 2021
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The Vlasov-Poisson equations describe many important physical phenomena such as the distribution of gravitating particles in interstellar space, high-temperature plasma kinetics, and the Landau damping effect. A joint team ...
Mathematics
Feb 5, 2021
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More than 40 years since they launched, the Voyager spacecraft are still making discoveries.
Astronomy
Dec 3, 2020
2
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On Oct. 29, mission operators sent a series of commands to NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft for the first time since mid-March. The spacecraft has been flying solo while the 70-meter-wide (230-foot-wide) radio antenna used to ...
Space Exploration
Nov 4, 2020
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