News by Subject Space & Planetary

NASA's continued quest to explore our solar system and beyond received a boost of new information this week with three key missions proving not only that they are up and running, but that their science potential is exceptional.

In the last few years, the Vavilov Ice Cap in the Russian High Arctic has dramatically accelerated, sliding as much as 82 feet a day in 2015, according to a new multi-national, multi-institute study led by CIRES Fellow Mike Willis, an assistant professor of Geology at CU Boulder. That dwarfs the ice's previous average speed of about 2 inches per day and has challenged scientists' assumptions about the stability of the cold ice caps dotting Earth's high latitudes.

A team led by researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB, UB-IEEC) and the University of Groningen has found, through the analysis of Gaia data, substructures which were unknown so far in the Milky Way. The findings, which appeared when combining positions and speed of six million stars from our galaxy's disk, have been published in the journal Nature.

A team including researchers from Nagoya University finds evidence of collisionless energy transfer occurring in the plasma of Earth's magnetosphere.

When you think of robotics, you likely think of something rigid, heavy, and built for a specific purpose. New 'Robotic Skins' technology developed by Yale researchers flips that notion on its head, allowing users to animate the inanimate and turn everyday objects into robots.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which began science operations in July, has released its first full frame image using all four of its cameras.

An unusual infrared light emission from a nearby neutron star detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope could indicate new features never before seen.

The NASA-funded, UCLA built ELFIN Cubesat will launch on Sept 15, piggy-backing with NASA's ICESat-2, to study how electrons are lost from the Van Allen Belts.

On Sept. 9, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory saw two lunar transits over the course of just six hours.