When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country’s first super heavy-lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides. Since then, China has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, […]
“It provides a natural framework, or a bookkeeping mechanism, to assemble very large numbers of Feynman diagrams,” said Marcus Spradlina physicist at Brown University who has been picking up the new tools of surfaceology. “There’s an exponential compactification in information.” Carolina Figueiredo, a graduate student at Princeton University, noticed a striking coincidence where three species […]
According to Lynn Wilson, who is the Wind project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, fuel is only one indicator of Wind’s life expectancy, however. “Based on fuel alone, Wind can continue flying until 2074,” he said. “On the other hand, its ability to return data hinges on the last surviving […]
The devastation of a giant meteorite impact on early Earth may have allowed life to flourish, new research suggests. A study of the remnants of a 3.26 billion-year-old impact reveals that microbial life — the only type of life at that time — may have ultimately benefited from the impact of a meteorite 50 to […]
Both Russia and China have tested satellites with capabilities that include grappling hooks to pull other satellites out of orbit and “kinetic kill vehicles” that can target satellites and long-range ballistic missiles in space. In May, a senior US defense department official told a House Armed Services Committee hearing that Russia was developing an “indiscriminate” […]
The International Space Station, or ISS—our largest home away from home—has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. That month Popular Science published an interview conducted by Science Editor, Dawn Stover, with two of the ISS’s three seminal residents, NASA astronaut William Shepherd and Russian cosmonaut Sergie Krikelev. The third was another Russian cosmonaut, Yuri […]
Earlier this week, North Korea apparently completed a successful test of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, lofting it nearly 4,800 miles into space before the projectile fell back to Earth. This solid-fueled, multi-stage missile, named the Hwasong-19, is a new tool in North Korea’s increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons. It has enough range—perhaps as […]
Although no ghouls or goblins or trick-or-treaters come knocking at the International Space Station’s front hatch, crew members aboard the orbiting facility still like to get in the Halloween spirit. Whether individually or as an entire crew, they dress up in sometimes spooky, sometimes scary, but always creative costumes, often designed from materials available aboard […]
How it started versus how it’s going for astronaut Nick Hague with ISS Ham Radio on the space station. Since November 2000, crew members like Hague have used ham radio to communicate with people on Earth through this educational program, also known as Amateur Radio on the International Space Station or ARISS. So far, there […]
Astronomers have discovered one of the largest carbon-based molecules found in deep space, located within the Taurus molecular cloud, 430 light-years from Earth. The finding is significant because it provides further clues that might help solve a longstanding mystery in astrochemistry: Where does carbon, the building block of life, come from? The molecule, called pyrene, […]
