Aerospace & Defence

Scientists have found compelling evidence for a stratosphere on an enormous planet outside our solar system. The planet's stratosphere-a layer of atmosphere where temperature increases with higher altitudes-is hot enough to boil iron. WASP-121b, located approximately 900 light years from Earth, is a gas giant exoplanet commonly referred to as a "hot Jupiter."

NASA called, and the Webb telescope responded. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently completed its Ground Segment Test Number 1 (GSEG-1), for the first time confirming successful end-to-end communication between the telescope and its mission operations center. GSEG-1, which completed on June 20, tested all of the communications systems required to support the telescope's launch, commissioning and normal operations once it is in orbit.

  Following a rigorous and extensive design proving exercise, MPE was awarded the contract to supply a quantity of its 1,200A HEMP filters for installation on a critical defence application in Virginia, US. The contract award was made via MPE’s distributor in the US, Technical Sales Solutions (TSS).

For many years astronomers have struggled to get good-quality 3D data of galaxies. Although this technique is very powerful as it allows researchers to “dissect” objects, this was a slow process as each galaxy had to be observed independently. Novel Australian designed and built instrumentation called the “Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral-field” (SAMI) unit at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) now allows astro...

It was midafternoon, but it was dark in an area in Boulder, Colorado on Aug. 3, 1998. A thick cloud appeared overhead and dimmed the land below for more than 30 minutes. Well-calibrated radiometers showed that there were very low levels of light reaching the ground, sufficiently low that researchers decided to simulate this interesting event with computer models. Now in 2017, inspired by the event in Boulder, NASA scientists will explore the moon...

For most viewers, the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse will last less than two and half minutes. But for one team of NASA-funded scientists, the eclipse will last over seven minutes. Their secret? Following the shadow of the Moon in two retrofitted WB-57F jet planes. Amir Caspi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his team will use two of NASA’s WB-57F research jets to chase the darkness across America on Aug...

A powerful new packet processing and high performance server blade has been launched by Artesyn Embedded Technologies, the ATCA-7540, based on dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors (codename Skylake), which were recently announced. The ATCA-7540 provides a migration path and future-proof platform for defense applications in air/shipborne data centres, ground control stations, network data analytics, ad-hoc mobile networks and other C4ISR tasks.

Northrop Grumman has highlighted NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) programme to audiences around the U.K. in a series of special screenings of the documentary film Into the Unknown as part of the company’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education outreach efforts. This is the first time Into the Unknown has been screened in the U.K.

An experimental project has been launched by UK scientists at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) to tackle the growing problem of space junk. Hundreds of thousands of man-made objects orbit the Earth, but fewer than 5,000 are operational satellites. The most congested area sits within 2,000km of the Earth’s surface, known as low Earth orbit (LEO), where collisions can cause further debris. 

The journal Astrobiology has published a special issue dedicated to the search for signs of life on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Included is a paper from Caltech's Jay Nadeau and colleagues offering evidence that a technique called digital holographic microscopy, which uses lasers to record 3D images, may be our best bet for spotting extraterrestrial microbes. No probe since NASA's Viking program in the late 1970s has explicitly searched for...