Aerospace & Defence

  W. L. Gore & Associates has announced that COTSWORKS has been recently named an authorised distributor and value-added reseller of GORE Aerospace Fibre Optic Cables for civil and military aircraft applications in Europe and North America.

  Altair is supporting PLD Space (#NewSpace), via its local Spanish 'HyperWorks Start-up Programme' with HyperWorks software licences and engineering expertise. PLD Space is a European rocket company developing a family of reusable micro launchers to provide suborbital and orbital launch services for small satellites and payloads.

The STR502 range of NVIS compatible, 8mm, rear-mount LED indicators from Oxley is now available at distributor Aerco. Designed to meet the growing customer demand for high-specification, rear mounted panel lamps, the LED indicators range is protected to IP68 and has been designed with a configuration option to meet the MIL-STD-3009 NVIS (Night Vision Imaging System) standard.

In each life a little rain must fall, but in space, one of the biggest risks to astronauts’ health is radiation 'rain'. NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP) is simulating space radiation on Earth following upgrades to the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. These upgrades help researchers on Earth learn more about the effects of ionising space radiation, to hel...

One of the busiest work stations on the International Space Station got a major upgrade recently, and it already has saved dozens of hours on a variety of experiments for crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory. The Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) is a sealed and enclosed work area installed in the U.S. Destiny lab on the space station, and is about the size of a 70-gallon fish tank.

The Milky Way and its immediate neighborhood are in the boondocks. In a 2013 observational study, University of Wisconsin–Madison astronomer Amy Barger and her then-student Ryan Keenan showed that our galaxy, in the context of the large-scale structure of the universe, resides in an enormous void — a region of space containing far fewer galaxies, stars and planets than expected.

The collision of a pair of colossal, stellar-mass black holes has made itself heard, nearly 3 billion light years away, through a cosmic microphone on Earth. On Jan. 4, the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) picked up a barely perceptible signal that scientists quickly determined to be a gravitational wave — a ripple of energy passing through the curvature of spacetime. The event, published in Physical Review Le...

  Nearly 50 years after British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell discovered the existence of rapidly spinning neutron stars, NASA will launch the world’s first mission devoted to studying these unusual objects. The agency also will use the same platform to carry out the world’s first demonstration of X-ray navigation in space.

Early science results from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter portray the largest planet in our solar system as a complex, gigantic, turbulent world, with Earth-sized polar cyclones, plunging storm systems that travel deep into the heart of the gas giant, and a mammoth, lumpy magnetic field that may indicate it was generated closer to the planet’s surface than previously thought.

An instrument originally developed to search for organic molecules on Mars is being repurposed to potentially hunt for life on a handful of moons in the outer solar system that appear to host oceans, geysers and vents of ice volcanoes. Will Brinckerhoff, a NASA scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, helped build a mass spectrometer for the European Space Agency’s 2020 ExoMars Rover mission.