The robot’s arm descends toward a pale, flat rock. Twelve centimeters. Eight. Five. A foam ring makes contact, a time-of-flight sensor confirms the distance, and a UV light flickers on inside the instrument housing as the microscope locks focus. The image appears on a screen across the room: gypsum, its crystalline texture mapped at millimeter … Read more
Europe’s ambitious exoplanet observatory is rapidly taking shape as engineers have successfully mounted 24 of the 26 specialized cameras that will serve as the mission’s eyes on the universe. The European Space Agency’s Plato (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) spacecraft, designed to search for Earth-like planets orbiting distant stars, has reached a critical milestone … Read more
The European Space Agency successfully launched its Biomass satellite on April 29, marking a pivotal moment in forest monitoring that scientists are calling the dawn of the “forest space age.” The groundbreaking mission lifted off aboard a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 11:15 CEST, carrying technology that can essentially weigh … Read more
Time moves differently in space – and a revolutionary European timepiece launched this week will prove it with unprecedented precision. The Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) successfully reached orbit on April 21, launching aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The mission puts the most accurate timekeeping system ever sent … Read more
Satellite data has revealed that sea surface temperatures are rising at an increasingly rapid pace, with warming rates now 4.5 times faster than observed in the late 1980s, according to a newly published study. The research, published in Environmental Research Letters, found that between 1985 and 1989, sea surface temperatures rose by a modest 0.06°C … Read more