What if, millions of light years away, things aren't so nice and soothing? Although it's hard to imagine, it's possible a number of those stars could be on their way toward (or have already experienced, because of the way light travels) a space collision. Although the stars look fixed...
On June 30, 2001, NASA launched the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a satellite that has since been used to map cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. CMB radiation is billions of years old, a byproduct of the Big Bang that scientists detect in the form of radio...
GPS, or the Global Positioning System, is a global navigation satellite system that provides location, velocity and time synchronization. GPS is everywhere. You can find GPS systems in your car, your smartphone and your watch. GPS helps you get where you are going, from point A to point ...
How long would it take to walk around the moon? "We would need essentially two parameters," said Erdal Yiğit, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University who studies the atmospheres of planets. Those parameters are the astronaut's velocity (speed and direction...
Rockets burn huge amounts of fuel very quickly to reach escape velocity of at least 25,000 mph (7 miles per second or 40,000 km/h), which is how fast something needs to go to break away from the pull of Earth's gravity. "Escape velocity" suggests a rocket must be going that fast...
How do you find the altitude and azimuth of a star? Celestial Coordinates: In order to describe the position of a star, a planet or any other astronomical objects, we need to use a well defined coordinate system. They might be a horizontal system which uses azimuth angle and altitude as ...
Urbanization and climate change are contributing to severe flooding globally, damaging infrastructure, disrupting economies, and undermining human well-being. Approaches to make cities more resilient to floods are emerging, notably with the design of flo
Car satellite navigation systems use GPS.(Image credit: Getty) These days, many people take Global Positioning System devices for granted. Most people are familiar with the concept of using a GPS system (either as a stand-alone device or in a phone) to find one's way around. GPS can als...
On the other side, large flapping-wing robots and birds are unable to hover due to unfavorable scaling, and therefore need forward velocity to maintain flight and be controllable. Consequently, landing on the branch requires a grasping method capable of stopping a forward-moving flapping robot. ...
This straight-line inertial path of a satellite, however, is balanced by a strong gravitational attraction directed toward the center of the planet. Sometimes, a satellite's orbit looks like an ellipse, a squashed circle that moves around two points known as foci. The same basic laws of ...