velocity

With a daring plan to collect rock and soil from the surface of Mars in the pipeline, NASA engineers are starting to move the necessary pieces into place here on Earth. The shielding that will protect these precious samples during the journey will play no small part in the mission’s success, and a round of high-speed projectile testing at a remote facility has edged it closer to lift off. The Mars Sample Return mission is slated for launch later this decade but is already underway in a sense, with the Mars Perseverance…

In the wacky gravitational environment in the heart of our galaxy, astronomers have found a gas blob orbiting our supermassive black hole at superspeed.Its characteristics are helping astronomers probe the space immediately surrounding Sagittarius A* in the search for answers about why the galactic center flickers and flares across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.Their findings suggest that the black hole is surrounded by a clockwise-spinning disk of material modulated by a powerful magnetic field.And confirms…

For the first time, scientists have taken a proper look at an ultra-low velocity zone. These enigmatic pockets of rock sit close to the Earth's core, about 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) below the surface.  At that depth they're obviously difficult to study, but we know they're there because of the way seismic waves flow through Earth. These zones get their name from the way seismic waves slow right down as they pass through them.Up until this point, images of these zones have been grainy and hard to analyze – but the…