After a successful launch on 28 December 2005, GIOVE A began transmitting navigation signals on 12 January 2006. Work is currently being performed to check the quality of these signals.
In space, the success of a mission relies on the achievement of a series of milestones. This is especially true for a pioneering mission such as GIOVE A, the first Galileo satellite, launched late last year under the European Space Agency’s responsibility.
Manufacture, launch, reaching fi
Temperatures hotter than the interiors of stars
Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.
The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.
The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares main
While studying a compound made of the elements cerium- rhodium-indium, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have discovered that a magnetic state can coexist with superconductivity in a specific temperature and pressure range. The discovery is a step toward a deeper understanding of how Nature is organized in regimes ranging from the fabric of the cosmos to the most fundamental components of elementary particles.
In research pub
It came from the edge of the visible universe, the most distant explosion ever detected.
In this week’s issue of Nature, scientists at Penn State University and their U.S. and European colleagues discuss how this explosion, detected on 4 September 2005, was the result of a massive star collapsing into a black hole.
The explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, comes from an era soon after stars and galaxies first formed, about 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big
A team of astronomers from France, the USA, Japan, and Korea, led by Denis Burgarella has recently discovered new galaxies in the Early Universe. They have been detected for the first time both in the near-UV and in the far-infrared wavelengths. Their findings will be reported in a coming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics. This discovery is a new step in understanding how galaxies evolve.
The astronomer Denis Burgarella (Observatoire Astronomique Marseille Provence, Laboratoire
The record-breaking performance of the Tevatron collider at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is pushing the search for dark matter, supersymmetric particles and extra dimensions to new limits. Repeatedly smashing peak luminosity records, the Tevatron has created record numbers of proton-antiproton collisions that provide the means to unveil the secrets of the universe. Accelerator experts at the lab announced today (March 2) that in only 14 months the Tevatron
Cornell physicist Veit Elser has been engrossed recently in resolving a pivotal question in biological imaging. So he hasn’t had much time for brainteasers and number games.
But in discovering an algorithm critical for X-ray diffraction microscopy, Elser and colleagues solved two problems. First, they gave researchers a new tool for imaging the tiniest and most delicate of biological specimens. And second, they discovered that the same algorithm also solves the internati
Research could lead to better understanding of typhoons, oceanic flows
For decades, scientists who study hurricanes, whirlpools and other large fluid vortices have puzzled over precisely how these vast swirling masses of gas or liquid sustain themselves. How do they acquire the energy to keep moving? The most common theory sounded like it was lifted from Wall Street: The large vortices collect power as smaller vortices merge and combine their assets, in the same way that small co
Radar mapping polar caps, impact craters
Two Mars orbiter missions — one from NASA, the other from the European Space Agency (ESA) — will open new vistas in the exploration of Mars through the use of sophisticated ground-penetrating radars, providing international researchers with the first direct clues about the Red Planet’s subsurface structure.
Roger Phillips, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, is
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) working with Russian colleagues have significantly improved the design of optical atomic clocks that hold thousands of atoms in a lattice made of intersecting laser beams. The design, in which ytterbium atoms oscillate or “tick” at optical frequencies, has the potential to be more stable and accurate than today’s best time standards, which are based on microwaves at much lower frequencies. More accurate time standards co
Everyday ice used to chill that glass of lemonade has helped researchers better understand the internal structure of icy moons in the far reaches of the solar system. A research team has demonstrated a new kind of “creep” or flow in a high-pressure form of ice by creating in a laboratory the conditions of pressure, temperature, stress, and grain size that mimic those in the deep interiors of large icy moons.
High-pressure phases of ice are major components of the giant icy moons of the o
A team of scientists from the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) and the Spintec laboratory (Grenoble, France), has for the first time produced microscopic magnetic states, known as “displaced vortex states”, that will allow an increase in the size of MRAMs (which are not deleted when the computer is switched off). The research has been published in Physical Review Letters and Applied Physi
This animation, made from images taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, illustrates a special pointing mode, the so-called ’target-tracking’ mode.
The images show crater Lichtenberg in the Oceanus Procellarum region on the Moon, centred on an area located at 66.8° West, 32.6° North.
The AMIE camera obtained the images from a distance of between 2064 and 2162 kilometres with a ground resolution of between approxi
Astronomers using the 76-m Lovell radio telescope at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory have discovered a very strange pulsar that helps explain how pulsars act as ‘cosmic clocks’ and confirms theories put forward 37 years ago to explain the way in which pulsars emit their regular beams of radio waves – considered to be one of the hardest problems in astrophysics. Their research, now published in Science Express, reveals a pulsar that is only ‘on’ for part of the time. The st
The fastest ever observations of protons moving within a molecule open a new window on fundamental processes in chemistry and biology, researchers report today in the journal Science.
Their capturing of the movements of the lightest and therefore speediest components of a molecule will allow scientists to study molecular behaviour previously too fast to be detected. It gives a new in-depth understanding of how molecules behave in chemical processes, providing opportunities for
The application of ’displaced vortex states’ – small magnetic circular movements of just a few thousandths of a millimetre – may accelerate the arrival of a new type of magnetic memory (MRAM) that does not disappear when a computer is switched off
A team of scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) and the Spintec laboratory (Grenoble, France), has for the first time produced microscopic magn
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