spacecraft tagged posts

On Earth, most of us rarely have to think about the signals that keep our internal clocks aligned. The sun rises, daylight changes, darkness arrives and morning comes again.

Our bodies have evolved alongside this roughly 24-hour cycle. Light is one of the strongest signals our bodies use to synchronize the circadian clock. But what happens when the sun no longer provides a reliable schedule?

A spacecraft orbits Earth roughly every 90 minutes, so astronauts experience about 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours. They cannot go to sleep every time the sun disappears—but their bodies still need to know when it is time to sleep, wake, eat, exercise and work.

This makes spaceflight more than just an engineering cha...

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so shows how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s like traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr (17,000 mph) and parallel parking in an open garage on a multibillion-dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward, you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone aboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resulting debris field could wipe out dozens of satellites and even harm people on the ground. No pressure, obviously.

For decades, aerospace engineers have docked successfully using hard-coded physics equations and human pilots to make correc...

Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields, allowing us to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity to an extent impossible with small objects. But we are also reaching the limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So, various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai—and he recently released a paper, available as a preprint on arXiv, about what it would take to send a gram-sized probe to a nearby black hole.

Unfortuna...

Four mice went to space as astronauts. One came back and became a mother. And that simple fact might matter more than you’d think for humanity’s future beyond Earth.

On 31 October, China launched four mice numbered 6, 98, 154, and 186, aboard the Shenzhou-21 spacecraft to the country’s space station, roughly 400 kilometers above Earth. For two weeks, the rodents lived in microgravity, exposed to space radiation and the peculiar conditions of orbital life. They returned safely on 14 November. Then, on 10 December, one of the females gave birth to nine healthy pups.

In a previous study, sperm from mice that had been in space had been used to fertilize female mice back ...