All articles tagged with #radar
The European Space Agency will press ahead with the EnVision Venus orbiter using a European radar payload after NASA signaled it cannot deliver the originally planned US‑built radar; Europe has pushed the launch to 2032 to develop its own radar, while NASA’s budget pressures drive cuts to international partnerships, prompting ESA to cover the radar role domestically and explore other collaborations.
A reanalysis of NASA’s LRO Mini-RF radar over Mare Tranquillitatis finds a bright radar return implying a cave conduit under the pit, extending tens of metres from the base and marking the first direct evidence of a lunar cave opening. But the mapped portion is small and the full extent is unknown. Separate mechanical models show lunar gravity could let lava tubes kilometres wide, so in theory the Moon could host large underground shelters; however, any cave would need robust life support and engineering to be usable, and future robotic missions are needed to map and assess stability and access.
Anker unveiled the SleepLab sleep speaker at IFA 2026, a radar-powered device that uses 60GHz millimeter-wave radar to monitor chest movements, heart rate, and breathing while delivering binaural-beat audio and ambient lighting to deepen relaxation; it runs independently of a phone, streams via Bluetooth, and aims to identify sleep routines over a month. Reservations start at $1, with the SleepLab Pro model priced at $269.99 with radar sensing or $169.99 without, and no subscription is required.
Freely available radar satellite data (SAR) enables year-round tracking of emperor penguin colonies, letting researchers observe winter movements without sunlight—revealing lower winter mobility, spring migrations onto glacier ice, and new insights into breeding cycles amid declining sea ice and the species’ endangered status.
NASA's JPL is testing a downscaled, foldable ground-penetrating radar antenna (based on the Vivaldi design) to fit between the SkyFall helicopter's landing legs and withstand simulated Mars landings and temperature swings, as part of the 2028 SkyFall concept to autonomously search for resources on Mars.
Earth and Venus are nearly the same size and gravity, but Venus may host a radar-bright highland coating of lead- and bismuth-sulfide compounds—metallic frost that is not yet confirmed. The mystery ties into how two similar worlds evolved such different climates and histories, and NASA’s DAVINCI and VERITAS missions will probe Venus’s atmosphere and surface to constrain its past water, atmospheric chemistry, and surface composition, while leaving the timing and exact path of their divergence unresolved.
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is seeking innovative, mobile prototypes for a Forward-Based Mode (FBM) Radar Next to replace or augment the current AN/TPY-2. The goal is a highly deployable, open-architecture, modular radar that can be rapidly set up in austere forward locations and integrated with the C2BMC system, improving survivability against missiles and drones amid a broader threat landscape that includes space-enabled targeting. The effort, conducted through an OTA prototyping approach, aligns with a 2027 budget push for next-generation radar prototypes and contemplates either a single integrated aperture or multiple distributed arrays, while remaining part of the THAAD/PATRIOT ecosystem.
Mercury’s cold polar crater floors hold water ice on permanently shadowed terrain, a conclusion supported by MESSENGER (2012) via radar-bright deposits, a hydrogen signal from neutron measurements, exposed versus buried ice seen in laser altimetry, and thermal models. Ice can be exposed in some areas and buried under a thin, dark cover in others; deposits may range from metres to tens of metres thick, and their age and origin remain topics of study, with delivery likely from comets/asteroids over hundreds of millions of years. The upcoming BepiColombo mission will map these regions in greater detail but will not land in the cold traps.
Cassini radar mapped long, near-parallel dunes across Titan’s equator, with individual ridges about 1–2 km wide and 100–150 m high, spanning hundreds of kilometres and occupying a notable fraction of the equatorial surface. The dune grains are plausibly water ice coated with hydrocarbons that settled from Titan’s orange atmosphere, though some analyses favor mostly organic grains; no spacecraft has sampled them yet. Dragonfly, launching no earlier than 2028 and arriving around 2034, will study dune material up close to help resolve the composition debate. The work also highlights an active sediment cycle driven by atmospheric chemistry and episodic methane storms that transport and shape the dunes over long timescales.
Today brings scattered showers in Baltimore, but forecasters expect a heat dome to surge from the Midwest into the Mid-Atlantic next week, likely delivering 3–4 days of 100°F+ heat and possibly setting multiple city records, though model guidance notes some uncertainty due to data limitations.
Australia has agreed to sell advanced radar technology to Canada in a record 1.7 billion deal, marking a major defense export and boosting Canada’s air-surveillance capabilities.
A 13-year radio study of Europa (2011–2024) finds its radar albedo is unusually bright and the scattering pattern matches clean, porous ice, placing new limits on how deep radar can probe below the icy crust and offering important context for upcoming missions like Europa Clipper and Juice.
A loud boom across Greater Boston Saturday afternoon is likely from a bolide, a meteor exploding in the atmosphere over the ocean. The USGS found no earthquake, but radar detected an anomalous flash consistent with a meteor reentry; NASA confirmation may follow after debris recovery.
NASA’s Earth Observatory uses a NISAR radar-derived false-color composite from 10 passes during the 2025–2026 growing season to visualize crop types and changes in South Africa’s Maize Triangle. Green marks vegetation, red shows unvegetated surfaces, and blue indicates how rapidly vegetation changed, offering a compact, per-pixel view of irrigation effects and land-use shifts over a large agricultural area.
ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 radar data reveal signatures consistent with buried subsurface ice beneath the floors of four doubly-shadowed craters in the Moon’s south polar region, including a 1.1‑km Faustini inner crater with a lobate rim that hints at an ice-rich impact. The ice lies in permanently dark, ultra-cold craters, preserved for billions of years, and could provide water and fuel for future human missions, making these regions highly strategic for lunar exploration and resource utilization.