Planetary System

The world relies on a modest number of countries to keep watch over the ocean. That arrangement is starting to fail. Europe and Asia must now decide whether to let the system unravel, or to take it up together.

To truly understand what an asteroid is made of, we need to send a probe to it. Remote sensing from ground-based telescopes, or even orbiting observatories, can only do so much. A new white paper submitted to the U.K. Space Agency's 2035 Space Frontiers program (available on the arXiv preprint server) pitches just such a mission architecture. Called the REndezvous Mission for Orbital Reconstruction of Asteroids (REMORA), the plan calls for a swarm of autonomous CubeSats to tag, track and […]

Swapping a beef steak for salmon once a week could save the amount of carbon needed to fly from London Heathrow to Morocco, according to new research by the universities of Bristol and Southampton. The study, published in Environmental Research: Food Systems, found the U.K.'s current level of meat consumption is 2 to 3 times higher than recommended guidelines.

Climate change will profoundly alter the dynamics of sea and land breezes in the Barcelona metropolitan area, trapping larger amounts of air pollutants over coastal areas and increasing health risks for millions of people. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, which produced high-resolution projections of future sea and land breeze behavior and air quality under climate […]

Planetary heating is intensifying and key climate indicators are deteriorating, top scientists said Thursday, warning that funding decisions affecting Earth observation systems in the United States and other countries threaten efforts to track global warming.