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04 November 2008
Ion Shield for Interplanetary Spaceships Now a Reality
British scientists invent "mini-magnetosphere" to protect astronauts during solar storms. Space travel during a solar storm just became a little less risky. UK scientists working at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford and the universities of York and Strathclyde have tested a "mini-magnetosphere" enveloping a model spacecraft in the lab. It turns out that their prototype offers [...]
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18 September 2008
Flyby Anomalies Explained?
Several different spacecraft have exhibited unexplained changes in speed during gravity assists when flying by Earth. First there was Galileo in 1990 and 1992, NEAR, which flew by Earth in January 1998, and then Cassini in August of 1999. Rosetta — the ESA spacecraft that recently flew by an asteroid – swung by [...]
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18 August 2008
Ten Mysteries of the Solar System
We've all wondered at some point or another what mysteries our Solar System holds. After all, the eight planets (plus Pluto and all those other dwarf planets) orbit within a very small volume of the heliosphere (the volume of space dominated by the influence of the Sun), what's going on in the rest of the [...]
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23 April 2008
Solar Sail Space Travel One Step Closer to Reality
Solar sails were once thought to belong in the realms of science fiction. Huge canopies of lightweight tin foil catching the solar photon breeze, slowly allowing spacecraft to cruise around our solar system propelled by the small but continuous radiation pressure. Recent years however have shown that solar sail spacecraft could be engineered in reality, [...]
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27 January 2008
Scientists Design "Ion Shield" To Protect Astronauts From Solar Wind Radiation
British scientists are working to build an invisible magnetic "Ion Shield" to be used during missions in space. A minature solar wind has been created in an Oxfordshire laboratory to simulate the highly charged particles emitted from the Sun and a magnetic "bubble" is being conceived to surround future spaceships. The magnetic field should have [...]
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20 January 2008
A Possible Answer to Flyby Anomalies
Strange things are happening to our robotic space explorers. Also known as the "Pioneer effect" (the unexpected and sudden alterations to Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 trajectories measured as they continue their journey into the outer solar system), similar anomalies are being seen in flybys by modern space probes. Earth flybys by Galileo, Rosetta, NEAR and Cassini have all [...]
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