A story by Chirantan Ganguly & Mahima Banerjee It was a bright Sunday morning during New Year’s week and Dr. Marcus Xavier was home after almost 2 months. Dr. Xavier’s son Quinn, a 14-year-old intelligent and dutiful boy, is a senior in middle school. He always had a knack for the sciences and he is particularly fond of studying Physics in his school. Quinn’s love for the sciences was instilled in him by his dad from a very young age. […]

By Fernanda Jamel The arrival of the rover, Perseverance, on Mars carried with it many expectations for the potential detection of life beyond Earth. The rover, which arrived on the red planet on 18 February 2021, contains specific instruments for identifying and characterizing organic compounds and minerals of astrobiological interest. Altogether there are seven payloads (or scientific instruments). Some of them are the ones that interest us for the detection of mineral biosignatures, such as the SuperCam, which has a […]

Are astronauts no longer required for space exploration? By Avanija Menon Automation is a widely debated topic across several professional fields. The accuracy and efficiency of machines often drives spiraling fears of unemployment, obsoletism, and worse. Automation is well known in the space industry as well, with the advent of rovers, landers, and orbiters aiding space missions and going to areas in the solar system that are currently out of human reach given our physical and monetary constraints. However, the […]

By Madeline Raith While humans have yet to journey in-person to Mars, we’ve now sent several rovers to drive around and explore the Red Planet for us. A rover can take pictures, perform experiments, and travel across the rocky terrain of Mars (this last part is what sets rovers apart from landers, which do all of their work in the place they landed). Since 1996, NASA has successfully landed a total of 5 rovers on Mars, and 2 of these […]

By Begüm Nisa Kasaplı Pluto is a dwarf planet of the Kuiper Belt, which is a group of objects orbiting in a disc-like zone beyond the orbit of Neptune. This distant realm is populated with thousands of miniature icy worlds that formed about 4.5 billion years ago in the history of our solar system. Pluto, which is a member of the Kuiper Belt, is smaller than Earth’s Moon. Also due to its lower density, Pluto’s mass is about one-sixth that […]

In the far depths of time of the early universe, a supermassive black hole causes chaos. by Rida Fatima The Discovery Using a device called Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), researchers at the National Institute of Natural Sciences have discovered a humongous galactic storm (otherwise known as a quasar wind) caused by a supermassive black hole within the early universe. To understand the significance of these findings, there are a few questions that need to be answered. What is a […]

by Tym Sokolskyi If asked to list cellular organelles, many people will name mitochondria, ribosomes, the nucleus, or maybe chloroplasts or the Golgi apparatus – things they teach about in schools (though many people might not even remember learning about those). It seems perhaps that the age of breakthroughs in cytology is long gone, however, as many studies keep pointing out, we still do not know all that much about many of the diverse forms floating in our cytoplasm. One […]

By Michael May Introduction If scientific research was reflective of high school level science courses, then every field would lie within its own separate sphere: biology dealing with all things living, chemistry describing the interactions of physical matter, and physics covering topics such as motion and the behavior of particles. However, it is fairly common knowledge that there is plenty of overlap between these fields, with studies such as biochemistry and biophysics dedicated to describing how one subject operates within […]

By Devika S How does a sail on a boat work? Simply put, the forces of the wind on the sails (aerodynamics) work against the drag force from the water (hydrodynamics) to propel the boat through the water. But not all sails are powered by the winds on Earth. Applying sail technology to space has led to the development of the “solar sail”, a technology that relies on powering spaceflight by the force of radiation from a star. Solar sailing […]

By Ignacy Górecki There is no doubt that being an astronaut may be among the toughest jobs on the planet. Despite the dangers of working in space and the incredibly demanding selection process, many people dream of going into space. It is clear that being an astronaut requires excellency and a remarkable set of skills. But are those skills universal? What differentiates the class of “Mercury Seven” from candidates of the latest European Space Agency astronaut selection? Each class of […]