Category Astronomy/Space

Illustration of DeployBots deploying themselves on a planet for space exploration. Credit: Wang et al. ©2017 Royal Society of Chemistry

The new robot can move itself without motors or any additional mechanical components. The robot “walks” when an electric current is applied to shape-memory alloy wires embedded in its frame: the current heats the wires, causing the robot’s flexible segments to contract and bend. Sequentially controlling the current to various segments in different ways results in different walking gaits.

The researchers expect that the robot’s ability to be easily deployed, along with its low mass, low cost, load-bearing ability, compact size, and ability to be reconfigured into different forms may make it useful for applications such as space missions, seabed exploration...

The extreme temperature of these unusual planets … allows the magnetic field to be coupled to the atmospheric winds Credit: Newcastle University

It is now possible to measure the magnetic field strengths of the hottest planets in the galaxy, new research has shown. Studying ‘hot Jupiters’, experts from Newcastle University, UK, have shown the planets’ magnetic field is responsible for the unusual behaviour of the atmospheric winds which move around it. Instead of moving in an eastward direction as has always been assumed, new observations have shown the winds varied from eastward to westward on the hot planet HAT-P-7b. Using this observation, Dr Tamara Rogers was able to estimate the magnetic field strength of this far-off planet.

Dr Rogers says this new understanding of the magnetic field...

This artistic impression shows the universe around the star formation area with, as an overlay, the scientists’ observations.(c) Veronica Allen/Alexandra Elconin (http://alsewhere.weebly.com)

An international team of astronomers, led by Dutch scientists, has discovered a region in our Milky Way that contains many nitrogen compounds in the southeast of a butterfly-shaped star formation disk and very little in the north-west. The astronomers suspect that multiple stars-to-be share the same star formation disk, but the precise process is still a puzzle.

They studied the star forming region G35.20-0.74N, more than 7000 light years from Earth in the southern sky. The astronomers used the (sub)millimeter telescope ALMA which can map molecular gas clouds in which stars form...

This artist concept shows the MAVEN spacecraft and the limb of Mars. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

On June 17, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) will celebrate 1,000 Earth days in orbit around the Red Planet. Since its launch in November 2013 and its orbit insertion in September 2014, MAVEN has been exploring the upper atmosphere of Mars. MAVEN is bringing insight to how the sun stripped Mars of most of its atmosphere, turning a planet once possibly habitable to microbial life into a barren desert world. “MAVEN has made tremendous discoveries about the Mars upper atmosphere and how it interacts with the sun and the solar wind,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator from the University of Colorado, Boulder...