In a new study, terrestrial bacteria-infecting viruses were still able to infect their E. coli hosts in near-weightless “microgravity” conditions aboard the International Space Station, but the dynamics of virus-bacteria interactions differed from those observed on Earth. Phil Huss of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, U.S.A., and colleagues present these findings January 13^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

At times the sun ejects energetic material into space which can have consequences for space-based and even ground-based electronic technology. Researchers aim to understand this phenomenon and find ways to forecast it, including how ejected material evolves as it travels through the solar system. For the first time, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, made high-quality measurements of an evolving cloud of solar ejecta by using multiple space-based instruments which were not designed to do so, and observed the way the clouds reduce background cosmic-ray activity.

Owing to the chaotic and non-integrable nature of three-body dynamics, the conventional Keplerian elements are rendered inadequate for cataloging cislunar space objects. Currently, there has been a conspicuous absence of universally recognized parameters for the characterization and cataloging of such objects, posing a significant impediment to effective cislunar space situational awareness. This research published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics proposes a novel approach to parameterize the orbits of the Earth-Moon collinear libration points by leveraging the theoretical frameworks of canonical transformations. Six characteristic parameters are established, which maintain a bijective correspondence with the state variables. Specifically, two parameters define the motion of the invariant manifold, while the remaining four parameters characterize the dynamics of the central manifold. Based on the parameters of central manifold, a situation map for depicting the distribution of libration point objects was developed, and its application in orbit identification was explored. This method furnishes novel instrumentation for enhanced space situational awareness and target cataloguing within the cislunar domain, enabling operators to effectively tag, track and manage cislunar objects with a compact, uncertainty-quantified parameter set.

A research team from the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) and Yinhe Hangtian has achieved a major advance in orbit mechanics by developing an analytical method capable of directly predicting spacecraft trajectories under third-body gravitational perturbations. This work, recently published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, resolves a long-standing challenge in celestial dynamics and provides a new theoretical tool for deep-space exploration and autonomous spacecraft control.

The wide-speed-range vehicles have attracted significant attention due to the exceptional performance in autonomous aerospace operations. In a recent innovative study published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, a double swept waverider employing novel vortex-wave coupling technology has addressed the fundamental compromise between high-speed shockwave management and low-speed vortex lift utilization. By integrating basic flow field design with an Improved Multi-Objective Cuckoo Search algorithm, this configuration achieves breakthrough wide-speed-range performance, laying a critical foundation for the development of horizontal take-off and landing aerospace vehicles.

 

The notion of employing detonation to enhance aerospace propulsion systems has been explored for several decades. In a recent breakthrough, a novel detonation engine known as the Ram-Rotor Detonation Engine has emerged. This innovative engine integrates the processes of propellant compression, detonation combustion, and expansion within a single rotor, enabling it to markedly enhance propulsion efficiency across a broad range of flight Mach numbers.