A groundbreaking new mass spectrometer designed and built by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been delivered for integration onto NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft. Scheduled to launch in 2024 and arrive in the Jovian ...
Space Exploration
Jan 5, 2023
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12
We recently examined how and why Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus, could answer the longstanding question: Are we alone? With its interior ocean and geysers of water ice that shoot out tens of kilometers into space that allegedly ...
Astrobiology
Nov 14, 2022
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25
A trio of researchers at Purdue University has developed a new theory to explain why Pluto's moon Charon has a reddish north pole. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Stephanie Menten, Michael Sori ...
The violent death throes of a nearby star so thoroughly disrupted its planetary system that the dead star left behind—known as a white dwarf—is sucking in debris from both the system's inner and outer reaches, UCLA astronomers ...
Astronomy
Jun 16, 2022
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2950
An ultraviolet spectrograph (UVS) designed and built by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is the first scientific instrument to be delivered for integration onto NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft. Scheduled to launch in ...
Space Exploration
Mar 3, 2022
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13
The Kuiper Belt is a disk of small icy bodies, thought to be remnants of the early Solar System, that circles the Sun from the orbit of Neptune (about 30 astronomical units, AU, from the Sun) to about 50 AU. KBOs orbit at ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2021
0
432
On Jan. 9, 2020, NASA's Lucy mission officially announced that it would be visiting not seven, but eight asteroids. As it turns out, Eurybates, one of the asteroids along Lucy's path, has a small satellite.
Space Exploration
Apr 21, 2021
2
45
In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA's New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft, and hear back that the onboard computer received and was ready ...
Space Exploration
Apr 19, 2021
2
13768
After traveling several billion miles toward the Sun, a wayward young comet-like object orbiting among the giant planets has found a temporary parking place along the way. The object has settled near a family of captured ...
Space Exploration
Feb 25, 2021
0
1766
A unique stage of planetary system evolution has been imaged by astronomers, showing fast-moving carbon monoxide gas flowing away from a star system over 400 light years away, a discovery that provides an opportunity to study ...
Astronomy
Nov 30, 2020
4
241
