NASA Mars team actively listening out for Opportunity  Pasadena CA (JPL) Oct 25, 2018 - The dust storm on Mars has ended with atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover site down to around typical values of 1.0 to 1.1. No signal from Opportunity has been heard since Sol 5111 (June 10, 2018). Opportunity likely experienced a low-power fault, a mission clock fault and an up-loss timer fault. The team has been listening for the rover over a broad range of times using the Dee ... more |
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Air Force contract Ball Aerospace for laser research  Washington (UPI) Oct 22, 2018 - Ball Aerospace and Technologies has inked a deal for $36 million with the U.S. Air Force to provide solid state laser effects and modeling services. Under the terms of the cost-reimbursement contract, announced by the Department of Defense on Friday, Ball will deliver innovative diagnostics and test methods, increasing fidelity, realism and confidence of predictive models, measuring and ... more |
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Security scare briefly locks down US nuclear weapons facility  Chicago (AFP) Oct 23, 2018 - Employees at the United States' primary nuclear weapons facility were briefly told to "shelter in place" Tuesday, when a suspicious vehicle in a parking lot triggered an emergency response. The incident at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas occurred just before noon (1800 GMT), when a routine inspection identified "a potential concern with a vehicle," the National Nuclear Security Administr ... more |
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US, Canada to conduct NORAD defense exercise this week  Washington (UPI) Oct 23, 2018 - NORAD and U.S. Northern Command will partner with the Canadian Joint Operations Command to conduct their 13th annual homeland defense exercise, Vigilant Shield 19, from their home bases at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado on Oct. 24-28, 2018. The rapid response event will deploy more than 5,500 personnel across air, land, maritime, space and cyber to test and grade the ability of NOR ... more |
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Asteroid named after university of China's science academy  Beijing (XNA) Oct 19, 2018 - An asteroid has been named after the university of China's top science academy, with approval from the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Asteroid Guokeda (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), coded 189018, was discovered on Oct. 14, 1998 by astronomers with the Beijing Schmidt CCD Asteroid Program at the Xinglong observatory in northern China, accord ... more |
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Noble metal-free catalyst system as active as platinum  Bochum, Germany (SPX) Oct 24, 2018 - The industry has been traditionally deploying platinum alloys as catalysts for oxygen reduction, which is for example essential in fuel cells or metal-air batteries. Expensive and rare, that metal imposes strict restrictions on manufacture. Researchers at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (RUB) and Max-Planck-Institut fur Eisenforschung have discovered an alloy made up of five elements that is noble ... more |
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An 80-year-old ferroelectricity mystery solved  Linkoping, Sweden (SPX) Oct 24, 2018 - Only now in 2018 have researchers successfully demonstrated that hypothetical 'particles' that were proposed by Franz Preisach in 1935 actually exist. In an article published in Nature Communications, scientists from the universities in Linkoping and Eindhoven show why ferroelectric materials act as they do. Ferroelectricity is the lesser-known twin of ferromagnetism. Iron, cobalt and nick ... more |
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Deformation of nanotubes to control conductivity  Moscow, Russia (SPX) Oct 24, 2018 - Scientists from the NUST MISIS Laboratory of Inorganic Nanomaterials together with their international colleagues have proved it possible to change the structural and conductive properties of nanotubes by stretching them. This can potentially expand nanotubes' application into electronics and high-precision sensors such as microprocessors and high-precision detectors. The research article ... more |
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How to mass produce cell-sized robots  Boston MA (SPX) Oct 24, 2018 - Tiny robots no bigger than a cell could be mass-produced using a new method developed by researchers at MIT. The microscopic devices, which the team calls "syncells" (short for synthetic cells), might eventually be used to monitor conditions inside an oil or gas pipeline, or to search out disease while floating through the bloodstream. The key to making such tiny devices in large quantitie ... more |
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Where deep learning meets metamaterials  Tel Aviv, Israel (SPX) Oct 24, 2018 - Breakthroughs in the field of nanophotonics - how light behaves on the nanometer scale - have paved the way for the invention of "metamaterials," man-made materials that have enormous applications, from remote nanoscale sensing to energy harvesting and medical diagnostics. But their impact on daily life has been hindered by a complicated manufacturing process with large margins of error. N ... more |
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San Antonio TX (SPX) Oct 25, 2018 - A Southwest Research Institute team using internal research funds has made several discoveries that expand the range and value of a future Pluto orbiter mission. The breakthroughs define a fuel-saving orbital tour and demonstrate that an orbiter can continue exploration in the Kuiper Belt after surveying Pluto. These and other results from the study will be reported this week at a workshop on fu ... more 
West Lafayette IN (SPX) Oct 25, 2018 - Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid the size of a small city smashed into the earth. This impact, the one that would lead to the end of the dinosaurs, left a scar several miles underground and more than 115 miles wide. Chicxulub, which lies underneath the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, is the best-preserved large impact crater on Earth, although it's buried underneath a half mile of roc ... more 
Pasadena CA (JPL) Oct 25, 2018 - You don't need wheels to explore Mars. After touching down in November, NASA's InSight spacecraft will spread its solar panels, unfold a robotic arm ... and stay put. Unlike the space agency's rovers, InSight is a lander designed to study an entire planet from just one spot. This sedentary science allows InSight to detect geophysical signals deep below the Martian surface, including marsqu ... more 
Tucson AZ (SPX) Oct 24, 2018 - Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a graduate student at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated (3200) Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought. The research team's results will be presented during a pres ... more 
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 25, 2018 - At the 50th annual meeting of its Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) in Knoxville, Tennessee, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) has premiered a visualization of the voyage of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. The 2-minute video, prepared using the AAS's WorldWide Telescope "Universe Information System," was unveiled coincident with a DPS press conference during whic ... more 
Pasadena CA (JPL) Oct 24, 2018 - Massive structures of moving air that appear like waves in Jupiter's atmosphere were first detected by NASA's Voyager missions during their flybys of the gas-giant world in 1979. The JunoCam camera aboard NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter has also imaged the atmosphere. JunoCam data has detected atmospheric wave trains, towering atmospheric structures that trail one after the other as they ro ... more 
Paris (ESA) Oct 25, 2018 - With air quality a serious environmental health problem, the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite is tasked with mapping air pollutants around the entire globe every day. This new mission has been providing data on carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone since July and now other polluting nasties such as sulphur dioxide and formaldehyde have joined the list of data products available to monitor ... more 
Washington DC (SPX) Oct 22, 2018 - Many semiconductor fabricators and research labs are under increasing pressure from, of all things, vacuum. These facilities need to remove greater amounts of gas molecules and particles from their setups as new technologies and processes demand lower and lower pressures. For example, the vacuum chambers in which microchip manufacturers lay down a series of ultrathin layers of chemicals st ... more 
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