Three ESA missions are due to send down robotic `spaceprobes` when they arrive at their alien destinations. Since these craft will be going where no one has gone before, how can scientists be sure what it will be like down there? How do you ensure that your spaceprobe is prepared for anything?
Experts take every precaution to ensure that these probes will not burn up entering an alien atmosphere, or meet a spectacular, untimely end via a crash landing on inhospitable terrain. These probes ex
A team of UK astronomers, led by postgraduate student Ed Hawkins, has made a decisive step toward resolving an argument that has rumbled on in the astronomical community for decades. The scientists from the University of Nottingham have been investigating the properties of quasars and nearby galaxies. As part of this study, they have overturned previous analyses which suggested that these two classes of object are physically associated, thus confirming the alternative, more widely-held view that quas
The scientists at A.F. Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, decided to restore the production of semi-conductor devices for pulse radiotechniques which was interrupted at the beginning of the 1990s. These devices have recently found wide application in different areas of technology: in ultra broadband apparatuses of communication, geopositioning and following, radars where a signal of high power should be generated for short time intervals. The idea of creating the devices
New views of star birth and the heart of a spiral galaxy have been seen by a state-of-the-art astronomical instrument on its first night. The new UKIRT Imaging Spectrometer (UIST) has a revolutionary ability to ’slice’ any object in the sky into sections, producing a three dimensional view of the conditions throughout entire galaxies in a single observation. UIST has just been installed on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii.
Project scientist Suzanne Ramsay How
Integral is the International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory of the European Space Agency. It is a cooperative mission with Russia and is scheduled for launch on 17 October 2002 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on a Russian Proton rocket, the Russian contribution to the programme.
It is the world`s most advanced gamma-ray telescope and will provide first-hand observations of the celestial objects that release some of the most energetic radiation of the Universe. In particular, sc
According to Douglas Adams, in his famous book The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, space is big. However, it seems near-Earth space is not big enough. In December 2001, the Space Shuttle pushed the International Space Station away from a discarded Russian rocket booster that was due to pass uncomfortably close. Space litter is a growing problem but smarter satellite design may help in the future.
From the beginning of the space era, satellites and deep-space probes have populated the Solar
A new Scottish multi-million pound photonics company is geared up for the future of telecommunications after securing a seven figure private investment deal.
The investment has allowed Helia Photonics Ltd, a Heriot-Watt University spin-out to purchase the coatings division of Terahertz Photonics in a technology transfer deal, and say they are already in discussions with a European partner over a major contract.
Helia Photonics CEO, David Hamilton, says they will be concentrating on
Study Suggests Promising New Avenues for Nanotube Research
Superconducting nanotubes may lie on the technology horizon, suggests a theoretical study recently published by researchers from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Pennsylvania, and Bilkent University in Turkey.
The intriguing possibility is the team’s most recent finding in a spate of studies showing how changing the shape of tiny single-walled
An international team of physicists working at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) facility at CERN has announced the first controlled production of large numbers of antihydrogen atoms at low energies. After mixing cold clouds of trapped positrons and antiprotons – the antiparticles of the familiar electron and proton – under closely monitored conditions, the ATHENA collaboration has identified antihydrogen atoms, formed when positrons bind together with antiprotons. The results are published online toda
Physicists have just achieved the world’s first controlled production of anti-hydrogen atoms, the crucial first step towards precision studies of its properties.
This achievement has opened up the potential to cool, trap and study anti-atoms.
A team from the University of Wales – Swansea, led by Professor Michael Charlton, played a key role in this major breakthrough as part of an international consortium, ATHENA. The Swindon based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council provi
This week, astrobiologists are discussing what ESA`s Huygens spaceprobe might discover when it parachutes to the surface of Saturn`s mysterious moon, Titan, in 2005. Titan possesses a rich atmosphere of organic molecules, which Huygens will analyse. Recently some scientists have begun to think that, by redefining life, in broader terms, what we may find on Titan may be life. If this is the case, it certainly will not be life as we know it…
Titan is an astrobiologist`s dream laboratory. Its
Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have produced the first ever action movies starring individual water molecules on a metal surface. The ending was a surprise even to the producers.
Working with a unique scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a team led by Miquel Salmeron, a physicist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, cooled the surface of a single crystal of palladium, a good catalyst for reactions involving hydrogen and water, to a tem
British astronomers, together with Australian and American colleagues, have used the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope [AAT] in New South Wales, Australia to discover a new planet outside our Solar System – the 100th to be detected. The discovery, which is part of a search for solar systems that resemble our own, will be announced today (Tuesday) at a conference on “The origin of life” in Graz, Austria. This takes the total number of planets found outside our solar system to 100, and scientists are now
Although you can never be certain of predicting future developments in science, there is a good chance of a fundamental breakthrough in physics soon. With a series of unique experiments and missions designed to test our understanding of gravity, the European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to get to the very bottom of it.
Scientists will study space phenomena that do not seem to conform to our perceived understanding of gravity. In this way, they hope to develop a greater comprehension of the Univ
Nature has been manipulating structures on the atomic and molecular scale for millions of years, in comparison humans have only been developing these techniques over the last few decades. Molecular engineering builds structures and devices at the smallest scales imaginable, aiming to make better materials, new types of information technologies, biomedical devices and much more. In an article, `Natural strategies for the molecular engineer`, published today in the Institute of Physics` journal, Nanote
Now physicists need not fully control the growth of laser crystals, because the crystals grow themselves. Professor Nikolay Ledentsov and his team at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute have learned how to provide special conditions in which crystals can grow defectless.
Growing crystals with enhanced characteristics is possible on the basis of the effect of quantum dots. A quantum dot is a tiny islet of one material lost in the monocrystal of the other material. For a long time t
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