Arctic town eyes future as Europe's gateway to space

Sweden's small Arctic town of Kiruna has a surprisingly international airport with regular flights to London and Tokyo, but it has even bigger plans: to offer commercial space flights.

Van Allen Probes reveal new dynamics of radiation belts

(Phys.org)—Just 96 days since their launch, NASA's twin Van Allen Probes have already provided new insights into the structure and behavior of the radiation belts that surround Earth, giving scientists a clearer understanding ...

New methods for ion cooling

Among the most important techniques developed in atomic physics over the past few years are methods that enable the storage and cooling of atoms and ions at temperatures just above absolute zero. Scientists from Bangalore ...

Could plasma jet thrusters 'kickstart' interplanetary travel?

A great offshoot from commercial space companies getting a foothold in real missions to orbit is that the old entrepreneurial space spirit seems to have been revived. People are attempting to develop and build what could ...

The spectral energy distribution of protostars

(Phys.org) -- Stars form when gravitational forces coalesce the gas and dust in interstellar clouds until the material forms clumps dense enough to become stars. Precisely how this happens, however, is still very uncertain. ...

Disentangling information from photons

Theoretical physicist Filippo Miatto and colleagues from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, have found a new method of reliably assessing the information contained in photon pairs used for applications in cryptography ...

First photo of shadow of single atom

In an international scientific breakthrough, a Griffith University research team has been able to photograph the shadow of a single atom for the first time.

Researchers catalog more than 635,000 Martian craters

It's no secret that Mars is a beaten and battered planet -- astronomers have been peering for centuries at the violent impact craters created by cosmic buckshot pounding its surface over billions of years. But just how beat ...

Finding ET may require giant robotic leap

(Phys.org) -- Autonomous, self-replicating robots -- exobots -- are the way to explore the universe, find and identify extraterrestrial life and perhaps clean up space debris in the process, according to a Penn State engineer, ...

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