The new data could help explain why and how solar wind accelerates at great speeds across the solar system.

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter probe made the first-ever remote sensing observation of a solar “switchback”, according to a blog post from the agency.

The ‘first evidence of a switchback in the solar corona’

---

Source: ESA/ATG medialab.

The new data gathered by the mission sheds new light on a mysterious phenomenon that had only been hypothesized until now. It could help explain how solar wind is propelled across the solar system at incredibly fast speeds.

Strange diamonds from an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system may have formed shortly after the dwarf planet collided with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago, according to scientists.

The research team says they have confirmed the existence of lonsdaleite, a rare hexagonal form of diamond, in ureilite meteorites from the mantle of the dwarf planet.

Lonsdaleite is named after the famous British pioneering female crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, who was the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society.

Half a century after the last person walked on the moon, original footage has been digitally overhauled to show NASA’s lunar missions in a new light.

Sure, asteroids did some of the work. But a few came from the fringes of our Solar System — and were kicked in by other stars.

Astronauts on the space station may seem distant, but they’re only 248 miles from Earth: a little more than the drive from New York City to Washington DC. Everything they need can be delivered in relatively short order. Astronauts visiting Mars won’t have such easy access. The red planet’s average distance from Earth is 140 million miles.

We can plan supply missions, but taking everything along for the ride would be expensive and impractical. Like Mark Watney in The Martian, explorers will have to live off the land too.

There’ve been plenty of proposals for how astronauts might produce the essentials, but until recently no technology had been field tested. Now, thanks to a machine called MOXIE, built by MIT and stowed away on NASA’s Perseverance rover, we can definitively say humans will be able to make oxygen on Mars.