News by Subject Space & Planetary

NASA's Voyager I spacecraft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause - the solar system's border with interstellar space - into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (plasma waves), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.

The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) have uncovered a new approach o structural topology optimization is outlined that unifies both design and manufacturing to create novel microstructures. Potential applications range from improved facial implants for cranial reconstruction to better ways to get materials into space for planetary exploration.

Researchers the world over have long believed that 70 percent of the universe is composed of dark energy, a substance that makes it possible for the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate. But in a new study, University of Copenhagen researchers tested a model which suggests that the universe's expansion is due to a dark substance with a kind of magnetic force.

Working with a team led by French astronomers, Southwest Research Institute scientists helped identify incredibly powerful winds in Jupiter's middle atmosphere for the first time. The team measured molecules exhumed by the 1994 impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 to trace winds in excess of 900 miles per hour near Jupiter's poles.