Aerospace & Defence
Aerospace subcontractor expands machining centre
A seventh 5-axis machining centre has been installed at Preston-based, tier-2 aerospace subcontractor, TGM, primarily to cope with increasing volumes of Airbus A350 work. Two years ago, each month the firm was delivering four port and starboard aircraft wing sets comprising 20 parts each, whereas today 10 sets per month are required and the number will climb further over the next two years.
Pulsars could hide planets hosting alien life
It is theoretically possible that habitable planets exist around pulsars - spinning neutron stars that emit short, quick pulses of radiation. According to research, such planets must have an enormous atmosphere that converts the deadly x-rays and high energy particles of the pulsar into heat. The results, from astronomers at the University of Cambridge and Leiden University, are reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Base metal technology enhances ceramic defence and aerospace portfolio
KEMET, supplier of electronic components, has announced that the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has accepted KEMET’s qualification of C0G and BP dielectrics to MIL-PRF-32535 ‘M’ and ‘T’ levels making them the first base metal electrode (BME) MLCCs qualified for defence and aerospace applications. MIL-PRF-32535 is the DLA’s first capacitor specification for defence and aerospace that capitalises on Base Metal El...
Discovering the eighth planet circling distant star
Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth.
Advancing accuracy over 20 years
The Galileo global navigation satellite system is raining down its signals across the globe, two decades since it was first conceived. One of the few European‑based manufacturers of GNSS receiver chips, u-blox, also twenty years old this year, has been closely keeping pace with Galileo’s development through their joint history.
Mars mission investigates habitability of distant planets
How long might a rocky, Mars-like planet be habitable if it were orbiting a red dwarf star? It's a complex question but one that NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission can help answer. "The MAVEN mission tells us that Mars lost substantial amounts of its atmosphere over time, changing the planet's habitability," said David Brain, a MAVEN co-investigator and a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the...
VMEbus systems designed for development and military sectors
Verotec has designed and supplied three different bespoke VMEbus systems for customers operating in the scientific, development and military sectors. The decline and eventual demise of VMEbus has frequently been postulated, mainly on the grounds of low bandwidth when compared to more recent open systems architectures, notably cPCI.
Software advances the modelling of astronomical observations
A recent study in Science cast doubt on one formerly favoured explanation for why an abundance of positrons – the antimatter counterparts of electrons – has been found near Earth. Two nearby collapsed stars, it turns out, aren’t likely to blame because their positrons couldn’t have traveled as far as the Earth.
Icebound detector reveals how ghostly neutrinos are blocked
Famously, neutrinos can zip through a million miles of lead without skipping a beat. Now, in a critical measurement that may one day help predict physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, an international team of researchers with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has shown how energised neutrinos can be stopped cold as they pass through the Earth.
Unique type of turbulence discovered in the Sun
In the outer atmosphere of the Sun a form of turbulence has been discovered that has always been considered impossible: the turbulence is not caused by colliding waves, but by waves moving into the same direction. With the discovery of this phenomenon – called ‘uniturbulence’ – a number of KU Leuven mathematicians have earned their place in the physics handbooks for future generations.