This Christmas Day, the skies may add to the festive cheer with a display of auroras, thanks to a blob of charged particles enroute to deliver a “glancing blow” to our planet following a powerful M8.9 solar flare. High-latitude areas in the U.S., including northern Montana, Minnesota and North Dakota, may witness auroral displays late […]
This image made available by NASA shows an artist’s rendering of the Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun. It’s designed to take solar punishment like never before, thanks to its revolutionary heat shield that’s capable of withstanding 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,370 degrees Celsius). Credit: Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL/NASA via AP, File A NASA spacecraft aims […]
On Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will come closer than ever before to “touching the sun,” getting more than eight times closer than Mercury does to our home star. It will also smash its own speed record, becoming the fastest human-made object when it zooms past our home star. While the probe will make […]
Washington DC After a months-long climb up the side of a crater on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has finally emerged on its rim — and now faces a 4-billion-year-old landscape never before explored on the red planet. Flying Mars rocks to Earth could cost an astronomical $11 billion “These are amongst the oldest rocks in […]
Scientific advisers to the European Commission are calling for a moratorium across the EU on efforts to artificially cool Earth through solar geoengineering. That includes controversial technologies used to reflect sunlight back into space, primarily by sending reflective particles into the atmosphere or by brightening clouds. Proponents argue that this can help in the fight […]
In 2025, we might detect the first signs of life outside our solar system. Crucial to this potential breakthrough is the 6.5-meter-diameter James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Launched aboard an Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou, a coastal town in French Guiana, in 2021, the JWST is our biggest space telescope to date. Since it began collecting […]
When the satellites zoomed in, you could see the panels gleaming from space. Pairing images taken miles above the Earth with Chinese customs records, BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase and her team discovered this year that the rooftops of homes and factories across Pakistan are blanketed with solar panels. Catching their own government by surprisePakistanis […]
Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci […]
In early November, three tiny Australian satellites from Curtin University’s Binar Space Program burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. That was always going to happen. In fact, Binar means “fireball” in the Noongar language of the First Nations people of Perth. When a satellite is in low Earth orbit (2,000km or less), it experiences orbital decay […]
Lisa Tiffin, senior vice president for energy management at Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association The move to renewable electricity and away from coal may have financial as well environmental benefits. That is the lesson at Tri-State Generation and Transmission Associationa power-supply rural electric cooperative which serves four states and 41-member distribution […]
