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Electric propulsion works by using electrical energy to accelerate a propellant to much higher velocities than is possible using chemical reactions. The most common propellant used in ion engines is xenon. Early ion engines used mercury and cesium, but they proved hard to work with.
The pale rock in the upper center of this image, about the size of a human forearm, includes a target called “Esperance,” which was inspected by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.
A team of researchers from the SETI Institute, the Mars Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, and the space robotics company Honeybee Robotics, has successfully completed a first series of field tests aimed at investigating how humans will explore and work on Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and eventually the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos.
A team of researchers from several universities – including UCF –has observed a rare quantum physics effect that produces a repeating butterfly-shaped energy spectrum in a magnetic field, confirming the longstanding prediction of the quantum fractal energy structure called Hofstadter’s butterfly.
Mars rover Curiosity drilled into this rock target, “Cumberland,” during the 279th Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s work on Mars (May 19, 2013) and collected a powdered sample of material from the rock’s interior.
This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF’s Very Large Array (pink).
The Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland is the largest valley glacier in the Alps and it has been losing mass since the mid-19th century. A new study using data from two NASA satellites found that glaciers like this one lost an average of 571 trillion pounds of ice per year from 2003 to 2009, which contributed to about 30 percent of the total observed global sea level rise during the same period.
A flash drive with stress-relief software for crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) will be taken to space by Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin soon.
Johnny Cash may have preferred this galaxy’s burning ring of fire to the one he sang about falling into in his popular song. The “starburst ring” seen at center in red and yellow hues is not the product of love, as in the song, but is instead a frenetic region of star formation.
Researchers show that high ancient shorelines do not necessarily reflect ice sheet collapse millions of years ago.
Numerical simulation of the density of matter when the universe was one billion years old. Galaxies formation follows the gravitational wells produced by dark matter, where hydrogen gas coalesces, and the first stars ignite.
Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds evidence of a major cosmic event near the end of the Ice Age. The ensuing climate change forced many species to adapt or die.
Entanglement, by general consensus of physicists, is the weirdest part of quantum science. To say that two particles, A and B, are entangled means that they are actually two parts of an inseparable quantum thing.
