Aerospace & Defence

Like the waistband of a couch potato in midlife, the orbits of planets in our solar system are expanding. It happens because the Sun’s gravitational grip gradually weakens as our star ages and loses mass. Now, a team of NASA and MIT scientists has indirectly measured this mass loss and other solar parameters by looking at changes in Mercury’s orbit. The new values improve upon earlier predictions by reducing the amount of uncerta...

NASA and its partners will host a news conference at noon EST (9 a.m. PST) Thursday, 18th January, at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, to discuss a recent experiment involving a new power source that could provide the safe, efficient and plentiful energy needed for future robotic and human space exploration missions. Audio of the news conference and presentation slides will stream live on NASA’s website.

In its search for exoplanets, NASA's Kepler telescope trails behind Earth, measuring the brightness of stars that may potentially host planets. The instrument identifies potential planets around other stars by looking for dips in the brightness of the stars that occur when planets cross in front of, or transit, them. Typically, computer programs flag the stars with these brightness dips, then astronomers look at each one and decide whether or not...

A seventh 5-axis machining centre has been installed at Preston-based, tier-2 aerospace subcontractor, TGM, primarily to cope with increasing volumes of Airbus A350 work. Two years ago, each month the firm was delivering four port and starboard aircraft wing sets comprising 20 parts each, whereas today 10 sets per month are required and the number will climb further over the next two years.

It is theoretically possible that habitable planets exist around pulsars - spinning neutron stars that emit short, quick pulses of radiation. According to research, such planets must have an enormous atmosphere that converts the deadly x-rays and high energy particles of the pulsar into heat. The results, from astronomers at the University of Cambridge and Leiden University, are reported in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

KEMET, supplier of electronic components, has announced that the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) has accepted KEMET’s qualification of C0G and BP dielectrics to MIL-PRF-32535 ‘M’ and ‘T’ levels making them the first base metal electrode (BME) MLCCs qualified for defence and aerospace applications. MIL-PRF-32535 is the DLA’s first capacitor specification for defence and aerospace that capitalises on Base Metal El...

Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth. 

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.