Astronomy
Human minds, robotic hands
Last July, a team of robots explored a simulated martian landscape in Germany, guided by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. This was the final session of the Surface Avatar experiment, a joint initiative between ESA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to investigate how astronauts can remotely control robotic teams.
This latest session took place at the DLR site in Oberpfaffenhofen and introduced new levels of autonomy, decision-making and realism, bringing Europe one step closer to seamless human-robot collaboration in space exploration.
Lunar Photobioreactors Could Provide Food And Oxygen On The Moon
Astronauts exploring the Moon will need all the help they can get, and scientists have spent lots of time and plenty of money coming up with different systems to do so. Two of the critical needs of any long-term lunar mission are food and oxygen, both of which are expensive to ship to the Moon from Earth. So, a research team from the Technical University of Munich spent some of their time analyzing the effectiveness of using local lunar resources to build a photobioreactor (PBR), the results of which were recently published in a paper in Acta Astronautica.
Simulating Ice Worlds in the Lab
Many objects in the outer Solar System contain large amounts of water ice, leading to a thick icy shell surrounding an ocean of liquid water. This water behaves like lava on Earth, reshaping their surfaces through a process called cryovolcanism. To better understand this process, researchers have created a low-pressure chamber that simulates the near-vacuum conditions on the surfaces of worlds like Europa and Enceladus. They could watch water create features we see across the Solar System.
Modeling Planet Formation With Water Tornadoes
Sometimes the easiest way to understand the physics of a phenomenon is to make a physical model of it. But how do you make a model of a system as large as, say, a protoplanetary disc? One technique, suggested in a recent paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and the University of Griefswald, would be familiar to any grade schooler who took a science class - spin water around in a circle really fast.
Webb Revists Hubble's Classic Ultra Deep Field
This image from the James Webb Space Telescope revisits one of the most iconic regions of the sky, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The result is a detailed view of thousands of distant galaxies, some dating back to the earliest periods of cosmic history.
