CubeSat
What Did We Learn From Manufacturing the ACS3 Solar Sail Mission?
We recently reported on the successful deployment of the solar sail of the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) technology…
A Pair of CubeSats Using Ground Penetrating Radar Could Map The Interior of Near Earth Asteroids
Characterizing near-Earths asteroids (NEAs) is critical if we hope to eventually stop one from hitting us. But so far, missions…
Swarms of Orbiting Sensors Could Map An Asteroid’s Surface
It seems like every month, a new story appears announcing the discovery of thousands of new asteroids. Tracking these small…
ESA’s Tiny Pinhole Thruster is Ready for Production.
Rocket propulsion technology has progressed leaps and bounds since the first weaponised rockets of the Chinese and Mongolian empires. They…
Lost In Space? Just Use Relativity
One of the hardest things for many people to conceptualize when talking about how fast something is going is that…
A Tiny Telescope is Revealing “Hot Jupiter” Secrets
A recent study presented this week at the 2023 meeting of the American Geophysical Union discusses observations of “hot Jupiters”…
Building a Satellite out of Wood? Use Magnolia
Typically when you think of a satellite, you think of a metal box with electronic components inside it. But that…
Pale Blue Successfully Operates its Water-Based Propulsion System in Orbit
New in-space propulsion techniques seem to be popping out of the woodwork. The level of innovation behind moving things around…
NASA is Testing out new Composite Materials for Building Lightweight Solar Sail Supports
Space exploration is driven by technology - sometimes literally in the case of propulsion technologies. Solar sails are one of…
A Small Satellite With a Solar Sail Could Catch up With an Interstellar Object
When Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever observed passing through the Solar System, was discovered in 2017, it exhibited some…