Size matters. In general as a spacecraft or instrument, the smaller you are, the less is the cost to get built, integrated, tested, and carried to your destination. People at JPL built the first smallsat, Explorer 1, but that was because that was all that Wernher von Braun’s U.S.
More than 800 million people in 86 countries live within 100 km of dangerous volcanoes. Most of the major advances in volcanology have been made following devastating eruptions from the direction observations of the activity and eruptions of the 1,551 active volcanoes that have resulted in more than 250,000 fatalities worldwide. Seismic signatures and magmatic degassing have been the most effective indicators of eruptions.
Lasers and diamonds are providing experimental access to the conditions existing deep inside terrestrial, giant and super-giant planets, revealing the material properties that control the state and evolution of planetary interiors. With pressures exceeding the forces defining the familiar structure of atoms, a new regime of chemical bonding (kilovolt chemistry) is being explored at conditions relevant to understanding the transition between planets and stars.
I will discuss the where, how, and why of submillimeter astronomy at Cornell University. The discussion will include a brief introduction to the astrophysics of the far-infrared and submillimeter spectral lines - how they cool interstellar gas clouds and trace the physical properties of both the gas clouds and nearby stars. I will then discuss how we detect this radiation with instrumentation built - by students - in our lab at Cornell.
The petrologic history of 11 million years of magmatism is recorded in a cluster of more than 20 volcanoes in the central Andes, where the crust is thick. Remarkable parallelism in lifespan, volume evolution, depth of magma storage, and compositional development indicate that these systems provide related perspectives on crustal feedbacks during protracted magmatism.
CubeSats and NanoSats have created a revolution in the space industry. These miniature spacecraft are the choice for student satellites worldwide, are becoming a serious option for many missions being developed by traditional space organizations, from NASA and JPL to the Air Force and NSF and are the baseline for a growing number of start-up companies. However, 10 years ago, when the CubeSat standard was developed by a Stanford-Cal Poly team success was not guaranteed.
The Dawn mission is characterizing two of only a few surviving intact protoplanets. The Dawn spacecraft, with its novel ion propulsion system, has completed its exploration of Vesta and is now in orbit around Ceres. The two massive asteroids could not be more different. Vesta (~500 km diameter) is a rocky body, with a large metallic core, an ultramafic mantle, and a basaltic crust.
With the discovery that planets surrounding stars are common place and the likelihood of discovering Earth size planets in the so-called habitable zone favorable; the consideration of the possibility of life else where in the galaxy becomes compelling. The term habitable zone generally refers to the radial distance a planet has with respect to its star, where surface water may be liquid. Whereas planet finding methods, e.g.
Because faint, low mass galaxies are numerous at high redshifts, their impact on the Universe is expected to be significant. They may host a substantial fraction of the Universe's star formation, provide many of the energetic photons needed to reionize the hydrogen gas surrounding galaxies, and affect their surroundings via powerful, starburst-driven galactic outflows of gas. Because of their faintness, however, the properties of these galaxies are difficult to determine.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since 21 September 2014 and collecting data in science mode since 16 November 2014. The science objectives of the MAVEN mission are to characterize the upper atmosphere and ionospheric structure and composition, the interactions of the sun and the solar wind with the planet, and the processes driving loss of gas from the atmosphere to space.
