Astro Blog

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Later this month, a diminutive telescope called Mauve will take to space. Unusually, a government space agency is not the owner. Rather, Mauve was built by a startup company that will sell astronomical data to researchers by subscription. With a 13-centimeter telescope squeezed into a satellite smaller than a microwave oven, Mauve is squarely in the little league of astronomical missions. But its creators hope it will set a precedent....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/startup-pioneers-subscription-service-space-based-astronomy .

https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2024/01/small-solar-sails-could-be-the-next-giant-leap-for-interplanetary-space-exploration By Marni Ellery, Berkeley Engineering.  Interview excerpt: ...a team of Berkeley researchers [...proposed] to build a fleet of low-cost, autonomous spacecraft, each weighing only 10 grams and propelled by nothing more than the pressure of solar radiation. These miniaturized solar sails could potentially visit thousands of near-Earth asteroids and comets, capturing high-resolution images and collecting samples. ...They describe their work, the Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail (BLISS) project, in a  study published  in the journal Acta Astronautica. The BLISS project brings together researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as the  Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center  and the  Space Sciences Laboratory . Their work builds on other...