Enlarge / A Pythom Space video from March 19 shows employees reacting to an expanding cloud of dust and exhaust. (credit: Pythom Space) There’s a small rocket company based in eastern California named Pythom Space. And like a lot of space startups, it has big dreams. In this case, co-founders Tina and Tom Sjögren have the goal […]
Enlarge / Fragment of the Antikythera mechanism, circa 205 BC, housed in the collection of National Archaeological Museum, Athens. (credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Image) The mysterious Antikythera mechanism—an ancient device believed to have been used for tracking the heavens—has fascinated scientists and the public alike since it was first recovered from a shipwreck over […]
Enlarge / Buried fiber-optic cables at Etna’s summit pick up subtle volcanic activity, potentially improving early warning systems. (credit: M.A. Gutscher) Towering 11,000 feet above a million humans, Mount Etna is one of the most thoroughly monitored volcanoes on Earth. Hundreds of sensors dot its flanks, and for good reason: it’s Europe’s most active volcano, […]
Enlarge / Kites could make it possible to build wind farms on land that isn’t windy enough for conventional wind turbine towers. (credit: Peter Cade | Getty Images) Any kid who’s ever flown a kite has learned the lesson: Once you can get the kite off the ground and high into the air, you’re more […]
Enlarge (credit: German Archaeological Institute) All that’s left of the ancient boat today is the bitumen, a black tar that once coated its framework of reeds, palm leaves, or wood. That fragile organic material is long gone, leaving behind only ghostly imprints in the bitumen. But there’s enough left for archaeologists to tell that in […]
Enlarge / The Axiom-1 mission will fly on the fifth mission of this Falcon 9 rocket first stage. (credit: NASA) A crew of four private citizens is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station today on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center. This is the Axiom-1 mission, named after the private company, […]
Enlarge / SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and the Endeavour spacecraft await the Axiom-1 crew launch on Friday. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann) Welcome to Edition 4.38 of the Rocket Report! We’re already in the second quarter of 2022, hard as it is to believe. This means that many companies with aspirations to debut new rockets this year, […]
Enlarge (credit: Salazar et al. 2022) A recent study of geological deposits and archaeological remains has identified a massive earthquake and tsunami that wiped out communities along the coastline of Chile’s Atacama Desert around 3,800 years ago. Studying the ancient disaster—and people’s responses to it—could help with modern hazard planning along the seismically active coast. […]
Enlarge / Meet Big John. (credit: Zoic Limited Liability Company) It’s difficult to tell which feature of the triceratops is more striking: the two large horns that jut from its forehead or the large frill that extends out from the back of its skull. In the minds of many paleontologists, the two features appear to […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a candidate event for a W boson decaying into one muon and one neutrino from proton-proton collisions, recorded by the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS detector in 2018. (credit: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN) The Standard Model of Particle Physics has withstood rigorous test after test over many decades, and the discovery of the Higgs […]