Aerospace & Defence
Astronomy video game wins National People’s Choice Award
'At Play in the Cosmos', an educational video game developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is the winner of the Third Annual Mashable + Games for Change People’s Choice Award. The educational resource for introductory college astronomy received the highest number of online votes among the 11 games nominated in the category. Gear Learning, part of the School of Education’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research, d...
Observations reveal Crab Nebula's polarised emissions
Since it was first observed little more than a thousand years ago, the Crab Nebula has been studied by generations of astronomers. Yet new observations by researchers at KTH show this “cosmic lighthouse” has yet to give up all of its secrets. The researchers' observations of polarised X-rays from the Crab Nebula and Pulsar, published in Scientific Reports, may help explain sudden flares in the Crab’s X-ray intensity, as wel...
Artificial eclipse will help image extrasolar planets
In our hunt for Earth-like planets and extraterrestrial life, we’ve found thousands of exoplanets orbiting stars other than our sun. The caveat is that most of these planets have been detected using indirect methods. Similar to how a person can’t look at anything too close to the sun, current telescopes can’t observe potential Earth-like planets because they are too close to the stars they orbit, which are about 10 billion times...
Researchers detect exoplanet with stratosphere
Scientists have found compelling evidence for a stratosphere on an enormous planet outside our solar system. The planet's stratosphere-a layer of atmosphere where temperature increases with higher altitudes-is hot enough to boil iron. WASP-121b, located approximately 900 light years from Earth, is a gas giant exoplanet commonly referred to as a "hot Jupiter."
James Webb Space Telescope completes GSEG-1 test
NASA called, and the Webb telescope responded. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently completed its Ground Segment Test Number 1 (GSEG-1), for the first time confirming successful end-to-end communication between the telescope and its mission operations center. GSEG-1, which completed on June 20, tested all of the communications systems required to support the telescope's launch, commissioning and normal operations once it is in orbit.
Keeping it cool with MPE HEMP filters
Following a rigorous and extensive design proving exercise, MPE was awarded the contract to supply a quantity of its 1,200A HEMP filters for installation on a critical defence application in Virginia, US. The contract award was made via MPE’s distributor in the US, Technical Sales Solutions (TSS).
Instrumentation allows simultaneous 3D view of galaxies
For many years astronomers have struggled to get good-quality 3D data of galaxies. Although this technique is very powerful as it allows researchers to “dissect” objects, this was a slow process as each galaxy had to be observed independently. Novel Australian designed and built instrumentation called the “Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral-field” (SAMI) unit at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) now allows astro...
Solar eclipse could help understand Earth’s energy system
It was midafternoon, but it was dark in an area in Boulder, Colorado on Aug. 3, 1998. A thick cloud appeared overhead and dimmed the land below for more than 30 minutes. Well-calibrated radiometers showed that there were very low levels of light reaching the ground, sufficiently low that researchers decided to simulate this interesting event with computer models. Now in 2017, inspired by the event in Boulder, NASA scientists will explore the moon...
Tracking the total solar eclipse from NASA’s WB-57F jets
For most viewers, the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse will last less than two and half minutes. But for one team of NASA-funded scientists, the eclipse will last over seven minutes. Their secret? Following the shadow of the Moon in two retrofitted WB-57F jet planes. Amir Caspi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his team will use two of NASA’s WB-57F research jets to chase the darkness across America on Aug...
High performance server blade for military networked systems
A powerful new packet processing and high performance server blade has been launched by Artesyn Embedded Technologies, the ATCA-7540, based on dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors (codename Skylake), which were recently announced. The ATCA-7540 provides a migration path and future-proof platform for defense applications in air/shipborne data centres, ground control stations, network data analytics, ad-hoc mobile networks and other C4ISR tasks.