Category: Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering
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A new look at Voyager 2 data explains one of Uranus’s long-standing mysteries
The spacecraft saw Uranus’s magnetic field at a weird time, so our picture of the planet and its moons actually represents an edge case rather than the norm.
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Could one of Jupiter’s moons support alien life? U-M scientists are on the case
U-M researchers helped find the first evidence for an ocean on the icy moon Europa. Now, with NASA’s return mission, they aim to learn if it’s habitable.
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The corona is weirdly hot—Parker Solar Probe rules out one explanation
S-shaped bends in the sun’s magnetic field don’t form at the sun’s surface, like some scientists thought, and can’t directly heat the sun’s corona.
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Sea ice’s cooling power is waning faster than its area of extent
A shift in Antarctica’s melting trends and slushy Arctic ice pushes warming from changing sea ice toward the upper limits of climate model estimates.
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Snowfall and drought: $4.8M field campaign will improve forecasts in western US, led by U-M
A mountaintop laboratory and a suite of radar instruments will study winter storms from large-scale cloud movement down to individual snowflakes in an NSF-funded project.
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Tracking undetectable space junk
Colliding pieces of space debris emit electric signals that could help track small debris littering Earth’s orbit, potentially saving satellites and spacecraft.
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NASA advances U-M’s Mission Concept Study to photograph entire auroras from space
Two satellites could join NASA’s fleet studying the Sun and its impacts on Earth’s magnetic field.
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$9.7M for tools to improve forecasts of harmful space weather
Better forecasting could protect astronauts and instruments from solar eruptions that release damaging, high-energy particles.
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Megastorms leave marks on Saturn’s atmosphere for hundreds of years
Massive storms have appeared as “Great White Spots” on Saturn every 20 to 30 years since 1876. The impacts of those older storms have lasted in Saturn’s atmosphere for centuries.
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Gulf offshore oil and gas production has double the climate impact as inventories report
High methane emissions from shallow water platforms underlie the problem.
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Tracking ocean microplastics from space
Microplastic pollution can be spotted from space because its traveling companion alters the roughness of the ocean’s surface.
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Senior hires stand out in an impressive year for faculty hiring
The cohort of 36 new tenured and tenure-track faculty includes 11 faculty hired at the rank of professor or associate professor.