Most spacecraft use solar panels to power their equipment — but missions to places such as the shadowed craters of the Moon or the deep Solar System can’t rely on energy from the Sun. Could nuclear fuel, with its high energy density, be a promising alternative? In this film, Nature explores the work of a
When I began my research career nearly a decade ago, there were no female academics in the mining-engineering department at Central South University in Changsha, China. Only this year did the department appoint me as its first female professor. I welcome that change, but it shows that the expectations around who can pursue mining careers
Imagine a nuclear reactor that is small enough to be transported on an aeroplane or inside a shipping container, and loaded with ten years’ worth of fuel. This kind of microreactor, say its proponents, could be shipped straight from factories to remote areas where electricity is expensive, such as rural Alaska and remote mining sites,
Fully autonomous space mission operations require the ability to detect faults and compensate for them without human intervention. To address this challenge and provide model-based support for system design and operations, it is important to connect fault management (FM) and model-based systems engineering (MBSE). This approach was successfully demonstrated with the model-based generation of a
Less than 300 million barrels left: the engineering limits threatening the American Strategic Petroleum Reserve | Fortune Dr. Siddharth Misra is a Professor at Texas A&M University and the CTO of AlterNature LLC. He specializes in physics-informed deep learning and sensing technologies for the exploration, development, and production of energy and earth resources. Dr. Misra
The day-to-day tasks of scientific research are rarely glamorous. As Trevor Rife worked towards his PhD in genetics, he had to extract DNA from freeze-dried tissue by grinding it in a 96-well plate. The process wasn’t difficult — it involved placing a ceramic bead into each well by hand, then capping the plate and shaking
