Science

DARPA has watched NASA’s work in nuclear propulsion systems for space exploration and believes the technology can be applied to military satellites. WASHINGTON — An experiment planned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will send to orbit a spacecraft powered by a nuclear propulsion system.  Michael Leahy, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said
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ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA is starting to implement recommendations of the astrophysics decadal survey by announcing plans for a new line of missions and laying the groundwork for future large space telescopes. During an online town hall meeting Jan. 11, originally intended to take place at the American Astronomical Society conference before that meeting was
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Taken from the January 2022 issue of Physics World. Members of the Institute of Physics can enjoy the full issue via the Physics World app. Thirty years after the World Wide Web first expanded from Europe to North America, Michael Riordan reveals how physicists and programmers played important roles in shaping the current wave of
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WASHINGTON — Astroscale U.S., a provider of on-orbit services to extend the life of satellites, has signed an agreement to use Orbit Fab’s in-space refueling tankers, the companies announced Jan. 11. Orbit Fab, a startup offering “gas stations in space,” will refuel Astroscale’s geostationary satellite servicing spacecraft known as LEXI, short for Life Extension In-Orbit.
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Real and imaginary: the time-dependent Schrödinger equation formulated using complex numbers. (Courtesy: iStock/piranka) Complex numbers are essential to achieve the most accurate quantum-mechanical description of nature, according to experiments done by two independent teams of physicists. Both studies were inspired by the Bell’s inequality test of quantum theory and suggest that complex numbers are more
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TAMPA, Fla. — SpaceX has dropped a plan to use Falcon 9 to launch the 30,000 satellites in its proposed second-generation Starlink broadband constellation, and is instead focusing on a configuration leveraging its upcoming Starship vehicle. The decision follows development progress that SpaceX said exceeded the company’s expectations and means it could start “launching the
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WASHINGTON — The White House’s decision to extend operations of the International Space Station through the end of the decade is a “trigger” for other partners to make their own plans to continue participation in the station. NASA announced Dec. 31 that the Biden administration agreed to continue operations of the ISS to 2030. Federal
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Charges are accelerated away from each other by the fluctuating electric field from a terahertz laser. Courtesy: Brian Long) Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the US have reconstructed a representation of the electron’s wave nature – its Bloch wavefunction – in a laboratory experiment for the first time. The work
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