European Space Agency – ESA and China (Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST)) have been cooperating through the Dragon Programme since 2004 to encourage the use of Earth observation in China. Building on the success of the past years, the programme is taking on
Called the PDG for short, the 2012 edition of The Review of Particle Physics runs to over 1,400 pages in print and will be mailed in July to over 16,000 subscribers, with a condensed, 320-page Particle Physics Booklet to follow in September. However, the online
Recently, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been turning up a new crowd of stars close to home: the coldest of the brown dwarf family of "failed" stars. Now, just as scientists are "meeting and greeting" the new…
The first remote-sensing soil moisture data record spanning the period 1978 to 2010 – a predecessor of the data now being provided by ESA’s SMOS mission. The datasets are available to the science community for feedback analyses and climate model validation.The
Solar physicist Dibyendu Nandi and PhD student Bidya Binay Karak have shown that the Sun’s memory of its sunspot cycles, long believed to be imprinted in its churning plasma, lasts no longer than five-and-a-half years.Sunspots are regions of strong magnetic fields
ESA astronaut André Kuipers is running experiments on the International Space Station that are shedding light on conditions deep inside Earth. Orbiting some 400 km above us, Geoflow is offering insights into the inner workings of our planet.Descending 3000 km under
A new initiative aims to build a grand tree of life that brings together everything scientists know about how all living things are related, from the tiniest bacteria to the tallest tree. The resulting tree will be digital, downloadable and continuously
Scientists plan to use the moon as a mirror to watch this year’s June 5-6 transit of Venus with the Hubble Space Telescope. That’s because Hubble can’t look at the sun directly – the bright light could damage the telescope’s super-sensitive instruments.This
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed that movement in sand dune fields on the Red Planet occurs on a surprisingly large scale, about the same as in dune fields on Earth.This is unexpected because Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, is only about
Since the high probability of unacceptable weather is preventing a launch attempt on March 19 again, NASA has rescheduled the launch of its five suborbital sounding rockets from the Wallops Facility in Virginia as part of a study of the upper level jet stream to no
