Physics and Astronomy

On August 10th 2005 NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will be launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida beginning its journey to the red planet. For scientists from Oxford, Cardiff and Reading it will be an intense time as it will be their third attempt to get their instrument to Mars onboard a NASA spacecraft.

The main aim of the MRO mission is to seek out the history of water on Mars. This will be accomplished by a suite of six science instruments, 3 engineering experiments a

Quantum communication networks show great promise in becoming a highly secure communications system. By carrying information with photons or atoms, which are entangled so that the behavior of one affects the other, the network can easily detect any eavesdropper who tries to tap the system.

Physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have just reached an important milestone in the development of these systems by entangling a photon and a single atom located in an atomic

The SSETI Express educational space mission received vital assistance with spacecraft integration and testing at ESA ESTEC. The student project to design, build and launch a satellite would not have been possible without the use of the ESTEC facilities and the technical assistance provided by personnel from ESA’s Directorate of Technical and Quality Management.

In its ESTEC Test Centre, ESA maintains facilities for the testing of space vehicles and their subsystems and components. The centr

Pluto’s moon hides a star

In a feat of astronomical and terrestrial alignment, a group of scientists from MIT (Cambridge, Mass.) and Williams College (Williamstown, Mass.) recently succeeded in observing distant Pluto’s tiny moon, Charon, hide a star. Such an event had been seen only once before, by a single telescope 25 years ago, and then not nearly as well. The MIT-Williams consortium spotted it with four telescopes in Chile on the night of July 10-11.

Astronomers report tremendous quantities of warm dusty debris surrounding a star with luminosity and mass similar to the sun’s, but located 300 light-years from Earth. The extraordinary nature of the dust indicates a violent history of cosmic collisions between asteroids and comets, or perhaps even between planets. The discovery is published July 21 in Nature.

“What is so amazing is that the amount of dust around this star is approximately 1 million times greater than the du

Precision mirrors to focus X-rays and neutron beams could speed the path to new materials and perhaps help explain why computers, cell phones and satellites go on the blink.

In the last few years, a team led by Gene Ice of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has improved by a factor of nearly 10 the performance of mirrors that enable researchers to examine variations in structure and chemistry and even individual nanoparticles. Information at this fine