NASA's Perseverance Rover has reached another milestone. It now holds the record for the longest distance travelled on another world, meaning Mars and Earth's Moon. It's all thanks the ingenuity behind AutoNav, it's hazard-detection driving system. It's a win for science, as more distance travelled means more scientific objectives are reached.
Mars is a planetary geologist’s paradise. NASA’s Curiosity rover drove that home recently, with a captivating panorama seen from the slopes of Mount Sharp. The image shows a stunning vista, and was not white-balance adjusted during processing, to show just what a viewer might really see at sunrise standing of Mars.
When astronauts first travel to Mars, or anywhere else in deep space, they will have to contend with two problems that our planet itself protects us from on its surface - radiation and weightlessness. Scientists already know both can have a profound impact on the human body, but just how much of one, and how long that impact can last, remain a mystery. A new paper by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and published in PLoS One, tackles those questions, and unfortunately comes up with some less than ideal answers in terms of the long term implications of deep space exposure.
Using observations from NASA's Juno spacecraft, an international team led by Shandong University shows that Jupiter's magnetodisk is a rippling structure that rotates with the planet, contrary to what scientists previously thought.
Astrophysicists think that hypernovae are the most powerful stellar explosions in the Universe. They're the most explosive type of core-collapse supernova. But the evidence for them is not voluminous, and new research pokes holes in it, pointing out that hypernovae may not actually exist.
Astronomers detected an unusual triangular light curve about 300 light years away. They were searching for Black Widow Binaries, where a dense neutron star eats its companion. But they found something different: an M dwarf slowly eating its binary companion brown dwarf.
In just one more month, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will make history. Moving at 12 kilometers per second versus Earth, the mission is about to rendezvous with the binary Dimorphos-Didymos asteroid pair. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into Dimorphos in 2022, and now Hera will provide a follow up view of the mission’s resulting handiwork. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently released a thought-provoking look at the perspectives of Hera, and what an astronaut might see from the surface of the asteroids as the mission speeds by.
