They used to call it “Seven Minutes of Terror”—a NASA probe would slice into the atmosphere of Mars at more than 20,000 kilometers per hour; slow itself with a heat shield, parachute, and rocket engines; and somehow land intact on the surface, just six or seven minutes later, while its makers waited helplessly on Earth. The computer-animated landing […]
Tucked under the belly of the Perseverance rover that will be landing on Mars in just a few days is a little helicopter called Ingenuity. Its body is the size of a box of tissues, slung underneath a pair of 1.2m carbon fiber rotors on top of four spindly legs. It weighs just 1.8kg, but […]
If you could stand next to NASA’s Perseverance rover on the Martian surface… well, you’d be standing on Mars. Which would be a pretty remarkable thing unto itself. But if you were waiting for the rover to go boldly exploring, your mind might soon wander. You’d be forgiven for thinking this is like watching paint dry. The Curiosity rover, which landed […]
Just before 4PM ET on February 18 (this Thursday), NASA’s Perseverance rover will attempt to land on Mars. Like its predecessor Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since 2012, Perseverance is a semi-autonomous mobile science platform the size of a small car. It’s designed to spend years roving the red planet, looking for (among other […]
A new 3-D printed electric thruster could one day help make advanced miniature satellites significantly easier and more affordable to build, a new study finds. Conventional rockets use chemical reactions to generate propulsion. In contrast, electric thrusters produce thrust by using electric fields to accelerate electrically charged propellants away from a spacecraft. The main weakness […]
The impact of COVID-19 has disrupted the global satellite production in an unprecedented way. Many of the satellite industry manufacturing processes came to a halt, when staff lockdowns and social distancing measures had to be employed. Recovery is slowly underway but the effect of the impact is far from over. The industry is now looking […]
This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Hypersonic weapons are one of the hottest trends in military hardware. These missiles, which fly through the atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound, are commonly depicted as […]
Photo: Enrico Sacchetti In 1960, astronomer Frank Drake turned the radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., toward two nearby sunlike stars to search for transmissions from intelligent extraterrestrial societies. With a pair of headphones, Drake listened to Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for a total of 150 hours across multiple […]
Photo-illustration: Stuart Bradford Early one morning last May, a commercial airliner was approaching El Paso International Airport, in West Texas, when a warning popped up in the cockpit: “GPS Position Lost.” The pilot contacted the airline’s operations center and received a report that the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range, in South Central New Mexico, […]
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