Aerospace & Defence

Now a tired and tested method for securing fixtures and jigs used in aircraft construction, clamping pins enable quick and easy loading and unloading of large parts. However, in their traditional designs they are not without flaws, which prompted WDS Component Parts to use its workholding expertise to look for improvements. Phil Holyome, Business Development and Special Projects Engineer at WDS Component Parts, elaborates on the process...

The European Space Components Coordination (ESCC) body has selected AEM's FM12 line of solid body fuses for inclusion in the European Preferred Parts List (EPPL). The FM12 series fuses, also included on the Defense Logistics Agency Qualified Products List (QPL), are intended for use in a wide variety of aerospace applications that require the highest level of reliability.  

Astronomers from Bonn and Tautenburg in Thuringia (Germany) used the 100-m radio telescope at Effelsberg to observe several galaxy clusters. At the edges of these large accumulations of dark matter, stellar systems (galaxies), hot gas, and charged particles, they found magnetic fields that are exceptionally ordered over distances of many million light years. This makes them the most extended magnetic fields in the universe known so far.

An advanced range of urethane-filled expanded aluminium gaskets have been developed by Parker Chomerics, and is able to provide a soft, electrically conductive fluid and pressure sealing solution for a variety of flange-to-flange assemblies. METALASTIC EXP-URE fully cured gaskets offer users the ability to minimise the galvanic corrosion of interfacing surfaces that demand electrical bonding, making them suitable in applications requiring li...

  A computer simulation helps explain the existence of puzzling supermassive black holes observed in the early universe. The simulation is based on a computer code used to understand the coupling of radiation and certain materials.

Demanding electric, magnetic and power requirements, harsh radiation, and strict planetary protection rules are some of the critical issues that had to be tackled in order to move ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer – Juice – from the drawing board and into construction. Scheduled for launch in 2022, with arrival in the Jovian system in 2029, Juice will spend three-and-a-half years examining the giant planet's turbulent atmosphere, ...

  An international team of astronomers has observed a striking spiral pattern in the gas surrounding a red giant star named LL Pegasi and its companion star 3,400 light-years from Earth, using a powerful telescope in northern Chile called Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA.

Johns Hopkins University scientist Kirby Runyon wants to make one thing clear: Regardless of what one prestigious scientific organisation says to the contrary, Pluto is a planet. So is Europa, commonly known as a moon of Jupiter, and the Earth's moon, and more than 100 other celestial bodies in our solar system that are denied this status under a prevailing definition of "planet."

The discovery of glowing stardust in a distant galaxy could shed more light for astronomers on the characteristics of our early Universe. Cosmic dust is forged inside stars and then scattered across the cosmos when they die, most spectacularly in supernova explosions. This dust is the key building block in the formation of new stars and planets. In the early Universe however — before the first generations of stars died out —...

  The appearance of supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe has puzzled astronomers since their discovery more than a decade ago. A supermassive black hole is thought to form over billions of years, but more than two dozen of these behemoths have been sighted within 800 million years of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.