As we mentioned in our last installment, the BepiColombo mission reached Mercury with the aid of solar electric ion thrusters. If that sounds to you like something that should be mentioned on the bridge of your favorite fictional TV starship, you are not alone. Solar electric propulsion (SEP) has been used on a number of…

You may have heard that a spacecraft just passed by Mercury—or not. The current spate of billionaires and actors going into space has kind sponged up all the bandwidth for space-related news stories of late, so you may have missed it.  Here at the Planetary Broadcast Network, however, we believe that this BepiColombo flyby of…

In recent weeks, you’ve probably heard a great deal about the Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s receiving so much media attention because it’s currently the dominant strain of the virus, but numerous other variants have been identified. The World Health Organization (WHO) has listed Eta, Iota, Kappa, and Lambda as “variants of interest”,…