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Reaction Engines Ltd. have begun their latest round of rocket engine testing in Westcott, UK. The SABRE engine requires a novel design of the rocket engine's thrust chamber and nozzle to allow operation in both air-breathing and rocket modes, as well as a smooth transition between the two. The Advanced Nozzle project is demonstrating the...
NASA’s New Horizons probe, now just 10 million miles from Pluto and 14 days from a historic July 14 flyby, is operating in near flawless fashion, making increasingly detailed observations of the enigmatic dwarf planet and its large moon Charon, project engineers and scientists reported Tuesday.
“If you’ve been looking at the pictures on the (New Horizons) website, you can see that Pluto and Charon are becoming more distinct in their surface features,” said mission operations manager Alice Bowman. “Every day is bringing new features into light.”
Streaking through space at more than 30,000 mph, New Horizons is on track to pass within about 7,800 miles of Pluto a few seconds shy of 7:50 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on July 14. Fourteen minutes later, the spacecraft will pass within 17,900 miles of Charon, the largest of Pluto’s five known moons.
Throughout the encounter, New Horizons will train its cameras and other instruments on Pluto and its retinue of moons for unprecedented close-range observations, revealing a never-before-seen world at the edge of the solar system.
Over the next few days, Bowman said, engineers plan to uplink the complex sequence of commands that will be executed aboard the spacecraft during the flyby. At the same time, they will be analyzing the probe’s flight path to determine whether another small trajectory correction maneuver might be needed to make sure the spacecraft hits the desired close-approach aim point.
NEW YORK (AP) — Comets are basically dirty snowballs, but it turns out they can have a very Earth-like feature: sinkholes.
That's what scientists think after analyzing data from a comet observed by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. The researchers suggest that 18 large holes on its surface are sinkholes, created by the collapse of its surface into a porous interior.
Some pits are hundreds of yards deep, which gives glimpses of the comet's interior. In some cases, the pits were seen spewing jets of gas and dust, as the sun's warmth turned the ice inside them into a gaseous form.
Other comets have pits too, but they don't look like the apparent sinkholes on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
It's the pits: Comet appears to have sinkholes, study says
Jul 1, 1:18 PM (ET)By MALCOLM RITTER
Excite News - It s the pits Comet appears to have sinkholes study says
(AP) This Dec. 21, 2014 photo made by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft and...Full Image
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NEW YORK (AP) — Comets are basically dirty snowballs, but it turns out they can have a very Earth-like feature: sinkholes.
That's what scientists think after analyzing data from a comet observed by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. The researchers suggest that 18 large holes on its surface are sinkholes, created by the collapse of its surface into a porous interior.
Some pits are hundreds of yards deep, which gives glimpses of the comet's interior. In some cases, the pits were seen spewing jets of gas and dust, as the sun's warmth turned the ice inside them into a gaseous form.
Other comets have pits too, but they don't look like the apparent sinkholes on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
New color images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced. Each of the spots is about 300 miles in diameter, with a surface area that's roughly the size of the state of Missouri.
Scientists have yet to see anything quite like the dark spots; their presence has piqued the interest of the New Horizons science team, due to the remarkable consistency in their spacing and size.
This is the latest map of Pluto created from images taken from June 27 to July 3 by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons, combined with lower-resolution color data from the spacecraft’s Ralph instrument. The center of the map corresponds to the side of Pluto that will be seen close-up during New Horizons’ July 14 flyby....
Since the ’90s, NASA has been actively exploring the surface of Mars. Armstrong Flight Research Centar is testing a prototype of an autonomous aircraft called Prandtl-m which could be the first to fly on Mars. Its name comes from Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars.
Prandtl-m will be a small, autonomous aircraft made of fiberglass or carbon fiber causing it to weigh less than 2.6 pounds. Since Mars has less gravity (0.377 gravity ratio) than the Earth, this weight will allow the aircraft to fly more efficiently. This year Nasa will be conducting some high-altitude tests with Prandtl-m at 100,000 feet and 450,000 feet to simulate what would be like to fly in Martian airspace.
The plan is to fold-up Prandtl-m inside spacecraft. Once the spacecraft reaches Mars, Prandtl-m will be deployed over the planet. It will be able to glide through its atmosphere for 20 miles and gather various data. After the glide, the aircraft will land and probably will continue to operate with a different function.