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Aerospace & Aeronautical

NASA Made the Hubble Telescope to Be Remade

When NASA decided in the 1970s that the Hubble Space Telescope should be serviceable in space, the engineering challenges must have seemed nearly insurmountable. How could a machine that complex and delicate be repaired by astronauts wearing 130-kilogram suits with thick gloves? In the end, spacewalkers not only fixed the…
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How to Disable a Nuclear Warhead in Midflight

In 1956 Henry Kissinger speculated in Foreign Affairs about how the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union could force national security officials into a terrible dilemma. His thesis was that the United States risked sending a signal to potential aggressors that, faced with conflict, defense officials…
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Miniature Sun-Watcher Completes 3-Year Mission

After three years in orbit, Europe’s Sunstorm CubeSat re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on 4 September, completing its mission to monitor X-ray pulses from solar flares, the breeding ground of disruptive space weather phenomena. These flares are sometimes accompanied by coronal mass ejections that spew billions of tonnes of material from the…
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European Satellite Burns Up for Science

Just how hot was that salsa? A European Space Agency (ESA) aircraft embarked on a mission on Sunday, 8 September, to answer this very question. The agency’s observational airplane—taking off from Easter Island, Chile—was geared up to collect data on a 24-year-old Earth observation satellite called Salsa as it burned…
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Is This Climate Tech Start-Up Going Rogue?

Another day, and another weather balloon ascends gracefully into the clear blue skies above Northern California. But this balloon isn’t headed up to the stratosphere to predict the weather—it’s going there to change it.Make Sunsets is a tiny start-up headquartered in South Dakota that is using balloons to release small…
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