The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched last December, has been slowly powering up its instruments and unfurling its sunshield, and is now in the process of aligning its mirrors in preparation for operation. Within ...
Astronomy
Feb 21, 2022
0
6112
Cooling things down in space is trickier than it might sound. But that is exactly the process the James Webb telescope is going through right now. Getting down to cryogenic temperature is imperative for its infrared imaging ...
Astronomy
Feb 16, 2022
1
105
Stars are born from clouds of gas and dust that collapse under their own gravitational attraction. As the cloud collapses, a dense, hot core forms and begins gathering dust and gas, creating an object called a "protostar."
Astronomy
Nov 18, 2021
2
88
Black holes are more than just massive objects that swallow everything around them—they're also one of the universe's biggest and most stable energy sources. That would make them invaluable to the type of civilization ...
Astronomy
Aug 26, 2021
17
1072
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently flight-certified all 24 of the detectors the mission needs. When Roman launches in the mid-2020s, these devices will convert starlight into electrical signals, which ...
Astronomy
Jun 9, 2021
0
242
Scientists report that it is possible to detect and predict heat damage in crops by measuring the fluorescent light signature of plant leaves experiencing heat stress. If collected via satellite, this fluorescent signal could ...
Biotechnology
May 24, 2021
0
12
A team of researchers from Columbia and Howard Universities in the U.S. and Peking University in China has developed a kind of colored double-layered paint that reflects heat. In their paper published in the journal Science ...
The Orion spacecraft with European Service Module at NASA's Plum Brook Station. The first Orion will fly farther from Earth on the Artemis I mission than any human-rated vehicle has ever flown before—but first it will undergo ...
Space Exploration
Dec 5, 2019
0
9
I am often asked how carbon dioxide can have an important effect on global climate when its concentration is so small—just 0.041% of Earth's atmosphere. And human activities are responsible for just 32% of that amount.
Environment
Sep 13, 2019
4
39
At human scale, controlling temperature is a straightforward concept. Turtles sun themselves to keep warm. To cool a pie fresh from the oven, place it on a room-temperature countertop.
Nanomaterials
Aug 10, 2019
0
490
