“We don’t call Houston ”Space City” for no reason.
We’re already home to NASA and the Johnson Space Center, and soon the city’s Spaceport will house the world’s first commercial space station.
Beginning in 2021, Axiom Space will be constructing its 14-acre headquarters at the Spaceport located at Ellington Airport. The hub will serve as the central hub for research, manufacturing and commerce, according to Mayor Sylvester Turner.
Scientists have just set a new world record for high-temperature sustained plasma with the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, reaching an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) for a period of 20 seconds.
Known as Korea’s “artificial sun”, the KSTAR uses magnetic fields to generate and stabilise ultra-hot plasma, with the ultimate aim of making nuclear fusion power a reality – a potentially unlimited source of clean energy that could transform the way we power our lives, if we can get it to work as intended.
Before this point, 100 million degrees hadn’t been breached for more than 10 seconds, so it’s a substantial improvement on previous efforts – even if there’s still a long way to go before we can completely ditch other sources of energy. At this point, nuclear fusion power remains a possibility, not a certainty.
The joint U.S.-European Solar Orbiter spacecraft had an appointment with Venus this morning, the first in a series of planetary flybys to hone the probe’s orbit on its journey to the sun.
Humans have taken spiders into space more than once to study the importance of gravity to their web-building. What originally began as a somewhat unsuccessful PR experiment for high school students has yielded the surprising insight that light plays a larger role in arachnid orientation than previously thought.
The spider experiment by the US space agency NASA is a lesson in the frustrating failures and happy accidents that sometimes lead to unexpected research findings. The question was relatively simple: on Earth, spiders build asymmetrical webs with the center displaced towards the upper edge. When resting, spiders sit with their head downwards because they can move towards freshly caught prey faster in the direction of gravity.
But what do arachnids do in zero gravity? In 2008, NASA wanted to inspire middle schools in the US with this experiment. But even though the question was simple, the planning and execution of the experiment in space was extremely challenging. This led to a number of mishaps.
They’re the sharpest commercially available radar shots of our planet.
Capella Space’s first fully operational satellite has snapped some breathtaking images of Earth during its first few months in orbit.
The Capella-2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, previously known as Sequoia, launched atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster on Aug. 30. Because Capella-2 captures imagery using radio waves rather than visible light, the spacecraft can both peer through clouds and study swaths of our planet that are cloaked in darkness.
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins harvested fresh radishes grown in space, opening new doors for producing food in microgravity to sustain future longer-term missions to the moon and Mars.
The radishes were grown in the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) aboard the International Space Station. NASA shared a time-lapse video of the radishes as they grew inside the APH over the course of 27 days.
The distorted galaxy gets its elegant look thanks to the phenomenon of gravitational lensing.
What we’re really seeing is a unique, lucky view of distant GAL-CLUS-022058s, which is far beyond the elliptical galaxy at the center of this shot. As the light from GAL-CLUS-02258s streams past the closer elliptical, the latter galaxy’s gravity bends in the path of the passing light, amplifying and distorting it into the view we see here.
TOKYO — Japanese logging company Sumitomo Forestry and Kyoto University are planting the seeds for a 2023 launch of the world’s first satellite made out of wood.
The partners announced their intentions on Wednesday, saying the aim was basic research and proof of concept.
They have agreed to conduct research on tree growth and the use of wood materials in space. They hope to promote technology for using wood in extreme environments on Earth.