NASA’S Juno spacecraft snapped this “dramatic image” of an eclipse shadow passing over Jupiter, caused by its volcanic moon Io.
Category: space – Page 716
OSIRIS-REx Meets Bennu’s Surprises
Even though it’s a month away from completing its primary task of capturing a sample, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission has already set records and revealed some surprising things about the asteroid Bennu: youtu.be/j_hSNBmpuqY
Earth is about to capture a new ‘mini moon’ (but it might not be a moon at all)
O,.o.
A new mini-moon might be about to join Earth’s orbit briefly, before being hurled back into space.
‘Minimoons’ are only a few feet across, and each tends to do a stint of around a few months in orbit – before resuming their previous lives as asteroids.
But this particular mini-moon may be a little different – as experts have suggested it’s not a moon at all, but man-made space junk.
Rosetta spacecraft detects unexpected ultraviolet aurora at a comet
Data from Southwest Research Institute-led instruments aboard ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft have helped reveal auroral emissions in the far ultraviolet around a comet for the first time.
At Earth, auroras are formed when charged particles from the Sun follow our planet’s magnetic field lines to the north and south poles. There, solar particles strike atoms and molecules in Earth’s atmosphere, creating shimmering curtains of colorful light in high-latitude skies. Similar phenomena have been seen at various planets and moons in our solar system and even around a distant star. SwRI’s instruments, the Alice far-ultraviolet (FUV) spectrograph and the Ion and Electron Sensor (IES), aided in detecting these novel phenomena at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G).
“Charged particles from the Sun streaming towards the comet in the solar wind interact with the gas surrounding the comet’s icy, dusty nucleus and create the auroras,” said SwRI Vice President Dr. Jim Burch who leads IES. “The IES instrument detected the electrons that caused the aurora.”
NASA Found Another Way Into Nuclear Fusion
O,.o.
NASA has unlocked nuclear fusion on a tiny scale, with a phenomenon called lattice confinement fusion that takes place in the narrow channels between atoms. In the reaction, the common nuclear fuel deuterium gets trapped in the “empty” atomic space in a solid metal. What results is a Goldilocks effect that’s neither supercooled nor superheated, but where atoms reach fusion-level energy.
☢️ You like nuclear. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.
