solar

NASA astronauts on spacewalk prep space station for new solar array

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The International Space Station is now ready for the addition of an upgraded solar array after two NASA astronauts completed a nearly seven-hour spacewalk on Tuesday (March 15). Expedition 66 crewmates Kayla Barron and Raja Chari secured brackets and erected struts at the base of one of the space station’s eight original power-providing arrays, preparing … Read more

Moon: Double-shadowed moon craters may be coldest place in the solar system

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The moon has deep craters that sit at such an angle that even reflected sunlight doesn’t touch some areas, making them prime locations for water ice to collect Space 14 March 2022 By Jonathan O’Callaghan Shackleton crater sits at the moon’s south pole Jorge Mañes Rubio. Spatial design & visualisation in collaboration with DITISHOE Some … Read more

Officials Confirm Several Geomagnetic Storms Are Hitting Earth This Week

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The Sun is continuing its rowdy behavior, with flares and coronal mass ejections almost every day since mid-January. That means the inevitable has happened: some of those eruptions have blasted in the general direction of Earth, which means we’re in for some solar storms.   The Space Weather Prediction Center of the US National Oceanic … Read more

How Paint And a Speaker Could Explain The Physics of The Sun’s Plasma Jets

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The Sun is blanketed by spiking, ultra-hot jets of plasma created from electrically charged particles, and now scientists have figured out more about how these jets (or spicules) are created and driven up into the star’s atmosphere.   Via a series of laboratory experiments and models, a new study describes the spicules as being like … Read more

Solar power: Static electricity can keep desert solar panels free of dust

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Dust drastically lowers the output of solar panels, but applying an electric field to the panels can make dust particles repel each other and disperse Technology 11 March 2022 By Chen Ly Illustration of dust removal from a solar panel using static electricity Sreedath Panat and Kripa Varanasi Static electricity could remove dust from desert … Read more

The sun readies for its close-up as Europe’s Solar Orbiter approaches

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The European Solar Orbiter mission will make its closest approach to the sun later this month, promising to capture images that could unravel some of the mysterious behaviours of the star at the heart of our solar system. Solar Orbiter, a European Space Agency (ESA) mission with a contribution from NASA, launched in February 2020. … Read more

When NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew close by the sun, telescopes were watching from Earth and space

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Telescopes on Earth and in space had the sun safely in their sights when NASA’s Parker Solar Probe made its 11th daring close flyby of the star on Feb. 25, all to understand more about the sun’s behavior. To be clear, the Parker Solar Probe wasn’t directly visible in the various instruments, as the van-sized … Read more

Tiny laser-propelled spaceships could travel to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond

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Miniature spaceships the size of cellphones could fly across the solar system using sails propelled by lasers, which would allow the tiny spacecraft to reach much faster speeds — and, potentially, much more distant destinations — than conventionally powered rockets, a new study finds. Current spacecraft usually take years to make trips within the solar … Read more

An Expert Explains How Solar Storms Can So Easily Destroy Satellites

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On Feb. 4, 2022, SpaceX launched 49 satellites as part of Elon Musk‘s Starlink internet project, most of which burned up in the atmosphere days later. The cause of this more than US$50 million failure was a geomagnetic storm caused by the Sun.   Geomagnetic storms occur when space weather hits and interacts with the … Read more

James Webb Space Telescope will study icy objects in the mysterious ‘graveyard of the solar system’

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Pluto may no longer be a planet, but the dwarf planet and its icy neighbors in the Kuiper Belt are about to enter the spotlight. One of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s first missions this year will be a program to study Pluto and some of the thousands of other celestial objects in the Kuiper … Read more