On the radar

News from the world of science

Dodging the debris in space

A piece of space junk passed within a few miles of the orbiting International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday, but the crew did not have to take shelter.

“Because there was not enough time to steer the ISS out of the way, as was done on Friday for a different piece of debris, the crew would have been asked to shelter inside the Soyuz TMA-20 that brought them up to the station in December had it become necessary,” Nasa has stated.

More than half a million pieces of space debris are tracked as they orbit Earth, according to Nasa. “They all travel at speeds of up to 17,500mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft.”

Mars mounds ‘are volcanoes’

Researchers believe that mounds spotted on the surface of Mars are fossil mud volcanoes. They analysed images of the features within Firsoff crater in the Arabia Terra region of Mars, which were detected by probes orbiting the red planet.

"Hundreds of mounds are observed on the crater floor, as isolated or composite subcircular cones 100–500m in diameter and tens of metres high," write the authors in the current edition of Earth and Planetary Science Letters."More than one-third of the mounds have subcircular depressions of five to 39 metres in diameter at their apices that we interpret as vents."

We thought it fell under ‘fair use’

- Craig Venter, who recently told a conference that he received a cease-and-desist order from the James Joyce estate because he used a Joyce quote as an encoded watermark in synthetic DNA. – as reported in the Guardian