It is said that you cannot recapture the childhood magic of Christmas. But any astronomer watching the skies on December 25 in 2021 will beg to differ. Because the most powerful space telescope ever constructed was about to launch. Our researchers take us through the first year of Webb.
Despite both radar and optical observations from Earth, asteroid Phaethon was proving elusive. "Phaethon’s orbit is special compared to other near-Earth asteroids,” explains Yoshida Fumi at the Planetary Exploration Research Center, Chiba Institute of Technology, and the University of Occupational and Environmental Heath, Japan. “There’s never a chance to observe Phaethon from Earth with a solar phase angle of zero degrees.”
In early September of 2022, Scientists around the world were anxiously pondering one important question: if it became necessary... if the future of life on our planet was at stake... could we save the Earth? It was time to find out.
"As something falls from a high position to a low position, it gains kinetic energy by losing gravitational potential.” It is a sentence that could belong in any physics textbook. But Associate Professor Yamaguchi Hiroya is not discussing the quintessential student problem of dropping an object into a well. Instead, he is describing the formation of the largest structures in the Universe: galaxy clusters. The activity within these cosmological monoliths have long remained unclear, but this is set to change with the launch of the XRISM X-ray Space Observatory next fiscal year.
Research highlights: The “Stony Materials Initial Analysis Team” have published their first results from the initial analysis of the asteroid Ryugu sample returned by the Hayabusa2 mission in the international journal Science.
Two asteroids. Two countries. Two incredible missions! JAXA's Hayabusa2 and NASA's OSIRIS-REx visited two asteroid, Ryugu and Bennu. This week, the teams get together to answer your questions on social media.
On June 8, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that the study phase for the Comet Interceptor mission was complete, and the mission had been formally approved for construction for a scheduled launch in 2029. Comet Interceptor is an ESA-led mission with JAXA participation, and the news was eagerly received by the Comet Interceptor team at ISAS.
Excitement is mounting for the inaugural launch of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS). But onboard one of the largest rockets ever built are two of the world's smallest spacecraft that will help test technology for future human exploration.
The accumulation of dust on the solar panels of NASA's InSight Mars Lander is set to bring the mission to a close this summer. But extraterrestrial seismometry is just beginning, explain our researchers.
Despite being a researcher and keen on quantitative descriptions, I chose more intuitive and fun title for this article. But what does it actually mean when we say that the Sun is “energetic”? In this article, we’ll take a look at how solar activity has been increasing during the 2020s, and the significance of solar observations by future missions such as Solar-C (EUVST).
