"Lunar regolith is fluffy due to the low gravity and lack of most weathering processes, and the particles are sharp like broken glass," Arno Rogg, a rover mobility system engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley said in a statement. The slopes, the size and distribution of the rocks in the sandpit, as well as the texture of the soil, were chosen to mimic what the rover is expected to encounter at its landing site on the lunar South Pole. They tested the rover's wheels in a high-tech sandpit fitted with cameras and sensors to monitor the wheels' behaviour in detail.
– Tereza Pultarova Satellite images SpaceX nailing booster landing for tenth timeįriday: January 7, 2021: A rover that will fly to the moon with NASA's 2023 Artemis II mission has been put to test to make sure its wheels won't get stuck in the "fluffy" lunar soil.Īlthough NASA has plenty of experience in driving rovers on Mars, the moon, with considerably lower gravity, is a different beast.Įngineers building the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) therefore partnered with Pittsburgh-based ProtoInnovations, to run a series of tests simulating as closely as possible what the rover will experience on the moon. That eruption produced a temperature drop that was measurable for three years. The effect was observed, for example, after the 1991 eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines. Powerful volcanic eruptions that inject vast amounts of ash particles into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere above the altitude of 12 miles (20 km), can sometimes temporarily cool down Earth as these particles reflect sunlight away from the planet. Scientists, however, think that although the sulfur dioxide from the volcano has already spread over Australia, the eruption is unlikely to have a lasting effect on Earth's climate. GOES-17 satellite (right), which is operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).įleets of low-Earth orbit satellites are now assessing the damage, which Cronin estimated to RNZ to be "apocalyptic" in scale. The collage shows the eruption as seen by the Korean GK-2A satellite (on the left), Japan's Himawari-8 (center) and the U.S. The videos compiled in this GIF were provided by Oxford University research fellow Simon Proud. 17) that the eruption, revealed as a massive explosion in imagery captured by satellites from the altitude of 22,000 miles (36,000 km), may have been the most powerful volcanic eruption on Earth in three decades. University of Auckland volcanologist Shane Cronin told Radio New Zealand (RNZ) on Monday (Jan. The remnants of these two islands are now again separated by the ocean. It was born out of another volcanic eruption that merged two smaller islands called Hunga Tonga and Hunga Ha'apai. The uninhabited island 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of Tongatapu, the main island of the Polynesian Kingdom of Tonga, only existed since 2009 and was fortunately uninhabited. 15), revealing the sheer force of the blast from different angles. Monday, January 17, 2022: Three weather satellites captured the massive underwater volcanic eruption that tore apart the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai island in the South Pacific Ocean on Saturday (Jan. – Tereza Pultarova Dragon departs space station after weather delay The interaction took place when Solar Orbiter was relatively close to Earth about three weeks after it had performed a flyby at our planet at a distance of only 285 miles (460 kilometers).Īlthough the comet's nucleus was 27.7 miles (44.5 million km) away from Solar Orbiter, close to the planet Venus, its giant tail stretched all the way to Earth's orbit and beyond, ESA said. The data, which is still being analyzed, will reveal how the comet interacts with the solar wind, the constant stream of charged particles emanating from the sun. 17, 2021, the European Space Agency (ESA), which operates the spacecraft, said in a statement. The spacecraft, called Solar Orbiter, passed through the comet's tail on Dec. Tuesday, January 25, 2022: A European spacecraft on a mission to take the closest ever images of the sun has flown through the tail of the comet Leonard, collecting a wealth of data about its chemical composition and magnetic field. Sun-observing spacecraft flies through tail of comet Leonard