NASA’s Interstellar Dust Catcher Set to Unlock Origins of Solar System
Interstellar dust drifting through our galaxy holds profound secrets about our solar system's initial building blocks and evolution. To capture and analyze these microscopic messengers from deep space, NASA has developed a specialized dust detector for its upcoming Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission called the Interstellar...
Have we really found the first samples from beyond the Solar System? The evidence is not convincing
Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in the US, has published a press release claiming that some of the 700 or so spherical metallic fragments (spherules) he recovered from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea, are from beyond the...
Engineering Problems – Why is it so difficult to send people to Venus?
Venus: the trouble with sending people there Venus, often called Earth’s “evil twin” planet, formed closer to the Sun and has since evolved quite differently from our own planet. It has a “runaway” greenhouse effect (meaning heat is completely trapped), a thick carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere, no magnetic field and a...