Physics and Astronomy

This area deals with the fundamental laws and building blocks of nature and how they interact, the properties and the behavior of matter, and research into space and time and their structures.

innovations-report provides in-depth reports and articles on subjects such as astrophysics, laser technologies, nuclear, quantum, particle and solid-state physics, nanotechnologies, planetary research and findings (Mars, Venus) and developments related to the Hubble Telescope.

Separation Day Arrives for Mars Express and Beagle 2

After a joint journey of 250 million miles (400 million km), the British-built Beagle 2 spacecraft and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter should now have parted and gone their separate ways.

At 8.31 GMT, software on Mars Express was scheduled to send the command for the Beagle 2 lander to separate from the orbiter. This would fire a pyrotechnic device that would slowly release a loaded spring and gently push Beagle 2 away from the mother spacecraft at around 1 ft/s (0.3 m/s).

UK scientists all set for New Year encounter with a comet

On January 2nd 2004 the NASA space mission, STARDUST, will fly through comet Wild 2, capturing interstellar particles and dust and returning them to Earth in 2006. Space scientists from the Open University and University of Kent have developed one of the instruments which will help tell us more about comets and the evolution of our own solar system and, critical for STARDUST, its survival in the close fly-by of the comet.

Launched in February 1999, STARDUST is the first mission designed to b

Christmas On Mars: Be There With ESA

Launched on 2 June 2003, after a six-month cruise at an average speed of about 10 kilometres per second and covering a distance of about 400 million kilometres, ESA’s Mars Express will arrive at Mars on Christmas Day.

After a very complicated and challenging series of operations during the night of 24/25 December 2003, the probe will be injected into an elliptical orbit near the poles of the Red Planet, while the Beagle 2 lander – released from the mother craft six days earlier – is exp

Lehigh group reports best threshold values for near-infrared range InGaAsN lasers

The ink was hardly dry on his new contract as assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Lehigh, when Nelson Tansu announced a breakthrough in his research into high-performance lasers.

In two recent issues of Applied Physics Letters (APL) – on July 7 and Sept. 29, Tansu and other collaborating researchers reported the best threshold values to date for near-infrared-range (with an emission wavelength of 1300-nm), indium-gallium-arsenide-nitride (InGaAsN) lasers emitting fr

Extremely cold molecules created by Sandia and Columbia University researchers

Using a method usually more suitable to billiards than atomic physics, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and Columbia University have created extremely cold molecules that could be used as the first step in creating Bose-Einstein molecular condensates. The work is published in the Dec. 12 Science.

The serendipitous achievement came when researchers at Sandia’s Livermore, Calif., and Columbia University, studying collisional energy transfer between a beam of atoms intersecting a

Has ESA’s XMM-Newton cast doubt over dark energy?

ESA’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has returned tantalising new data about the nature of the Universe. In a survey of distant clusters of galaxies, XMM-Newton has found puzzling differences between today’s clusters of galaxies and those present in the Universe around seven thousand million years ago. Some scientists claim that this can be interpreted to mean that the ’dark energy’ which most astronomers now believe dominates the Universe simply does not exist…

Observati

Page
1 1,967 1,968 1,969 1,970 1,971 2,052