Aerospace & Defence

The Galileo global navigation satellite system is raining down its signals across the globe, two decades since it was first conceived. One of the few European‑based manufacturers of GNSS receiver chips, u-blox, also twenty years old this year, has been closely keeping pace with Galileo’s development through their joint history.

How long might a rocky, Mars-like planet be habitable if it were orbiting a red dwarf star? It's a complex question but one that NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission can help answer. "The MAVEN mission tells us that Mars lost substantial amounts of its atmosphere over time, changing the planet's habitability," said David Brain, a MAVEN co-investigator and a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the...

  Verotec has designed and supplied three different bespoke VMEbus systems for customers operating in the scientific, development and military sectors. The decline and eventual demise of VMEbus has frequently been postulated, mainly on the grounds of low bandwidth when compared to more recent open systems architectures, notably cPCI.

  A recent study in Science cast doubt on one formerly favoured explanation for why an abundance of positrons – the antimatter counterparts of electrons – has been found near Earth. Two nearby collapsed stars, it turns out, aren’t likely to blame because their positrons couldn’t have traveled as far as the Earth.

Famously, neutrinos can zip through a million miles of lead without skipping a beat. Now, in a critical measurement that may one day help predict physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, an international team of researchers with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has shown how energised neutrinos can be stopped cold as they pass through the Earth.

In the outer atmosphere of the Sun a form of turbulence has been discovered that has always been considered impossible: the turbulence is not caused by colliding waves, but by waves moving into the same direction. With the discovery of this phenomenon – called ‘uniturbulence’ – a number of KU Leuven mathematicians have earned their place in the physics handbooks for future generations.

  EIS Electronics designs, manufactures and delivers precise, high tech electrical harnesses qualified for use in Aerospace and Defense applications. From major Airbus programmes and Ariane 5 launch vehicles to various satellites, military armoured vehicles, submarines and radar systems.

A strange visitor, either asteroid or comet, zipping through our solar system at a high rate of speed is giving astronomers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to examine up close an object from somewhere else in our galaxy. “It’s a really rare object,” explains Ralf Kotulla, a University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer who, with colleagues from UCLA and the NOAO, used the 3.5 meter WIYN Telescope on Kitt Peak, Ar...

A NASA Mars rover mission set to launch in 2020 will rely on a special parachute to slow the spacecraft down as it enters the Martian atmosphere at over 12,000 mph (5.4 kilometers per second). Preparations for this mission have provided, for the first time, dramatic video of the parachute opening at supersonic speed. The Mars 2020 mission will seek signs of ancient Martian life by investigating evidence in place and by caching drilled sample...

  An international team of astronomers, including a University of Southampton expert, has discovered a type of explosion in a distant galaxy. The explosion, called PS1-10adi, seems to prefer active galaxies that house supermassive black holes consuming the gas and material around them.