New detailed images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft of the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus reveal distinctive geological features, and the most youthful terrains of any seen on Enceladus. These findings point to a very complex evolutionary history for Saturn’s brightest, whitest world.
Cassini’s flyby on July 14 brought it within 175 kilometers (109 miles) of the surface of the icy moon. The close encounter revealed a landscape near the south pole
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and university researchers report a significant step toward sorting out the nanotube “problem”–the challenge of overcoming processing obstacles so that the remarkable properties of the tiny cylindrical structures can be exploited in new polymer composite materials of exceptional strength.
As described in the current issue of Physical Review Letters,* their analysis reveals that, during mixing, carbon nanotubes suspended i
A compact, inexpensive method for stabilizing lasers that uses a new design to reduce sensitivity to vibration and gravity 100 times better than similar approaches has been demonstrated by scientists at JILA in Boulder, Colo. JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The method, described in the July 15 issue of Optics Letters,* stabilizes laser light to a single frequency, so that it can be use
A novel suitcase-sized telescope could revolutionise the way we see the Earth and other planets. ESA has supported the work of a group of students in developing the Dobson Space Telescope, being tested this month aboard ESA’s parabolic flight campaign aircraft.
This experimental prototype launches in a compact configuration and then unfolds to provide a cost-effective space telescope. It could lead to fleets of low-cost telescopes, bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Saturn’s radio emissions could be mistaken for a Halloween sound track.
That is how University of Iowa researchers Bill Kurth and Don Gurnett describe their recent findings, published 23 July in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Their research investigated sounds that are not just eerie, but also descriptive of a phenomenon similar to Earth’s northern lights. The study was based on data from the Cassini spacecraft’s radio and plasma wave science instrume
On August 10th 2005 NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will be launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida beginning its journey to the red planet. For scientists from Oxford, Cardiff and Reading it will be an intense time as it will be their third attempt to get their instrument to Mars onboard a NASA spacecraft.
The main aim of the MRO mission is to seek out the history of water on Mars. This will be accomplished by a suite of six science instruments, 3 engineering experiments a
Quantum communication networks show great promise in becoming a highly secure communications system. By carrying information with photons or atoms, which are entangled so that the behavior of one affects the other, the network can easily detect any eavesdropper who tries to tap the system.
Physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have just reached an important milestone in the development of these systems by entangling a photon and a single atom located in an atomic
The SSETI Express educational space mission received vital assistance with spacecraft integration and testing at ESA ESTEC. The student project to design, build and launch a satellite would not have been possible without the use of the ESTEC facilities and the technical assistance provided by personnel from ESA’s Directorate of Technical and Quality Management.
In its ESTEC Test Centre, ESA maintains facilities for the testing of space vehicles and their subsystems and components. The centr
Pluto’s moon hides a star
In a feat of astronomical and terrestrial alignment, a group of scientists from MIT (Cambridge, Mass.) and Williams College (Williamstown, Mass.) recently succeeded in observing distant Pluto’s tiny moon, Charon, hide a star. Such an event had been seen only once before, by a single telescope 25 years ago, and then not nearly as well. The MIT-Williams consortium spotted it with four telescopes in Chile on the night of July 10-11.
Astronomers report tremendous quantities of warm dusty debris surrounding a star with luminosity and mass similar to the sun’s, but located 300 light-years from Earth. The extraordinary nature of the dust indicates a violent history of cosmic collisions between asteroids and comets, or perhaps even between planets. The discovery is published July 21 in Nature.
“What is so amazing is that the amount of dust around this star is approximately 1 million times greater than the du
Precision mirrors to focus X-rays and neutron beams could speed the path to new materials and perhaps help explain why computers, cell phones and satellites go on the blink.
In the last few years, a team led by Gene Ice of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has improved by a factor of nearly 10 the performance of mirrors that enable researchers to examine variations in structure and chemistry and even individual nanoparticles. Information at this fine
The journal Nature publishes this week a study of electronic dynamics (“Direct observation of electron dynamics in the attosecond domain”). The participants of this study, together with other researchers, have been professors Daniel Sánchez-Portal and Pedro Miguel Etxenike from the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC).
A researcher group of various German laboratories has done the experimental part of the study, and the theoretical explanation based on quantum physics
Physicists have created the state of matter thought to have filled the Universe just a few microseconds after the big bang and found it to be different from what they were expecting. Instead of a gas, it is more like a liquid. Understanding why it is a liquid should take physicists a step closer to explaining the earliest moments of our Universe.
Not just any old liquid, either. Its collective movement is rather like the way a school of fish swims ‘as one’ and is a sign that the flu
Scientists have found that a star that exploded in 1979 is as bright today in X-ray light as it was when it was discovered years ago, a surprise finding because such objects usually fade significantly after only a few months.
Using ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory, a team of astronomers has discovered that this supernova, called SN 1979C, shows no sign of fading. The scientists can document a unique history of the star, both before and after the explosion, by studying rings o
In a feat of astronomical and terrestrial alignment, a group of scientists from MIT (Cambridge, Mass.) and Williams College (Williamstown, Mass.) recently succeeded in observing distant Pluto’s tiny moon, Charon, hide a star. Such an event had been seen only once before, by a single telescope 25 years ago, and then not nearly as well. The MIT-Williams consortium spotted it with four telescopes in Chile on the night of July 10-11.
In addition to assessing whether Charon has an atm
An international consortium of 7 universities and research centres are seeking an alternative to silicon-based microelectronics in using molecules of DNA, which could enable a reduction in size of the current systems by a thousand times. The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) is participating in this project through the research group led by Professor Ángel Rubio Secades of the Department of Materials Physics.
The really innovative nature of this project lies, on the one hand, in th
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