space mission tagged posts

Through exquisite, millimeter-scale, formation flying, the dual satellites making up ESA’s Proba-3 will accomplish what was previously a space mission impossible: Cast a precisely held shadow from one platform to the other, in the process blocking out the fiery sun to observe its ghostly surrounding atmosphere on a prolonged basis.

Ahead of the Proba-3 pair launching together later this year, the scientists who will make use of Proba-3 observations were able to see the satellites with their own eyes...

A NASA team scanned these terrestrial rock samples, all measuring two to four inches in diameter, to investigate possibilities for future in-space use of non-destructive evaluation techniques. The two rock samples on the bottom are from Earth’s newest volcanic island in the Kingdom of Tonga; the sample on the upper left from kilometers deep contains large green olivine crystals and came from Oahu in Hawaii. The sample on the upper right is a 3.7-million-year old impact melt breccia from the Elgygytgyn impact crater in Siberia. Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk

A diagnostic tool, similar in theory to those used by the medical profession to non-invasively image internal organs, bones, soft tissue, and blood vessels, could be equally effective at “triaging” extraterrestrial rocks and other samples befor...