SA’s Hera mission for planetary defense, being designed to survey the smallest asteroid ever explored, is really three spacecraft in one. The main mothership will carry two briefcase-sized CubeSats, which will touch down on the target body. A French team has been investigating what might happen at that initial instant of alien contact. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-cubesats-asteroid.html…
Tag: French
SuperCam instrument integrated on NASA’s Mars 2020 rover
The French/American SuperCam instrument has been delivered early June to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has been integrated this week on NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. The French space agency, CNES, together with university institutes in France, developed the multi-purpose camera to remotely analyze minerals, chemistry, sounds, and test for compounds associated with life, together with the Los Alamos National Laboratory (US)….
Viewing Saturn’s rings soon? Read me 1st
The best time of 2019 for seeing Saturn’s glorious rings is upon us. You’ve seen the photos, but maybe you want to see the rings with your own eyes? Here are a few things to think about. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/viewing-saturns-rings-tips-for-beginners…
Meet the Cat-Fox, an Oddball Feline Roaming Around a French Island
They’re big and have fox-like tails. Source: https://www.livescience.com/65744-cat-fox-new-species.html
Facebook Token Runs Into Instant Political Opposition in Europe
Hours after Facebook unveiled its cryptocurrency project today, European officials have called for scrutiny of the plan, raising concerns over whether the project was sufficiently regulated. From a report: French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said the digital currency known as Libra shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for traditional currencies. “It is out of question” that Libra “become a sovereign…
Saturn’s moon Mimas, a snowplow in the planet’s rings
The Solar System’s second largest planet both in mass and size, Saturn is best known for its rings. These are divided by a wide band, the Cassini Division, whose formation was poorly understood until very recently. Now, researchers from the CNRS, the Paris Observatory—PSL and the University of Franche-Comté have shown that Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons, acted as a kind…
Ariane 6 development on track
Europe’s Ariane 6 launch vehicle is set to debut with a commercial mission in 2020—industry is carrying out the final tests and starting production. The Ariane 6 launch zone at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana is near completion. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-06-ariane-track.html…
The Man Whose Bizarre Tank Designs Made the D-Day Victory Possible
dryriver writes: In 1942, Allied troops tried to invade a French port at Dieppe. The troop landing was a disaster — within 10 hours, 60% of the 6,000 allied troops that landed were dead, and all 28 tanks that were supposed to support the troops had been picked off by mines and anti-tank weapons. The Allies realized that conventional tank designs…
Bees Can Link Symbols To Numbers, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers have trained honeybees to match a character to a specific quantity, revealing they are able to learn that a symbol represents a numerical amount. The discovery, from the same Australian-French team that found bees get the concept of zero and can do simple arithmetic, also points to new approaches for bio-inspired computing…
A brief history of Ariane 5 launches with science missions onboard
If it wasn’t for launch capabilities we would never have delved deep into the echo of the Big Bang nor lived out the adventures of Rosetta and Philae at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Nor would we have captured some of the Universe’s most energetic phenomena, or be on our way to the innermost planet of the solar system. Some of ESA’s biggest science…