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Planetary Exploration With Four-Legged Rovers Carrying Only Two Instruments
Mars rovers have spearheaded the exploration of the planet over the last 20 years. MSL Curiosity and Perseverance are awe-inspiring machines, and Spirit and Opportunity were similarly impressive. Collectively, they’ve greatly improved our understanding of Mars and its ancient climate and shed light on its potential ancient habitability. But according to new research, the next
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Catching the 2026 April Lyrid Meteor Shower
Keep an eye out this coming week for the venerable Lyrid meteor shower. April flowers mean one thing to springtime sky-watchers: it’s time for the Lyrid meteor shower. The Lyrids are always a good bet, and always make the top ten list for annual meteor showers. And to top it off, 2026 is a favorable
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Stardust in the Clouds of Venus.
Venus is often called Earth’s twin, but spend any time with it and the comparison falls apart quickly. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead, its atmosphere is a crushing blanket of carbon dioxide, and its clouds are made of concentrated sulphuric acid. Somewhere beneath those acid clouds, between the surface and the main
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A New Eye Opens at the Top of the World.
When I built my first telescope, a 15cm reflector, it was in my back garden! Location was the least of my problems but imagine trying to do the same thing with a somewhat larger telescope at an altitude of 18,400 feet above sea level! The summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert is higher
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The Sharpest Eyes on the Sun The Sharpest Eyes on the Sun.
The Sun’s outer atmosphere is trying to kill us, not literally of course but the corona, that wispy halo of superheated gas extending millions of kilometres into space, is the birthplace of solar flares and the violent particle storms that follow. Understanding exactly how those eruptions work requires watching them in X-rays, and watching them
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Magnetism Frozen in Time. – Universe Today
Stars are not the serene, unchanging beacons they appear to be. Over billions of years they swell, convulse, shed their outer layers and collapse into dense remnants. Throughout all of that drama, something appears to be surviving, something invisible, threaded through the stellar interior from the very beginning. A new study suggests that magnetic fields
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Are Neutrinos Their Own Evil Twins? Part 4: Majorana’s Mystery
(This is Part 4 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) It’s 1937. One year before Ettore Majorana vanishes. He is sitting with Dirac’s framework — the precise, picture-perfect vision of quantum mechanics — and doing what very
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Exploring the Moon’s Shadowy Craters With Nuclear-Powered Rovers
NASA and other space agencies are intent on sending astronauts back to the Moon, and this time, to stay! A vital part of these plans for reducing costs and dependency on Earth is the process of In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), using local resources for construction materials and meeting astronauts’ basic needs. This is why the
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The Incredible Shrinking Neutrino. – Universe Today
They pass through you at a rate of around a hundred trillion every second, that’s about 12 quadrillion while you read this article, depending on how fast you read of course! You won’t feel a thing though since neutrinos are so reluctant to interact with ordinary matter that the entire Earth, and you too, are
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Reading the Moon’s Buried Past.
The lunar south pole looks chaotic from orbit. Craters heaped upon craters, ancient basins, scarps and slopes tumbling in every direction, it is without doubt, one of the most geologically complicated terrains in the inner Solar System. That aside, it’s exactly where we intend to send people since understanding what lies beneath that battered surface
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