A floating, robotic film designed at UC Riverside could be trained to hoover oil spills at sea or remove contaminants from drinking water. Powered by light and fueled by water, the film could be deployed indefinitely to clean remote areas where recharging by other means would prove difficult. Superimposed images showing Neusbot’s bending process. Image credit: Zheiwei Li/UCR “Our motivation ...

SpaceX completed a static fire test of a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a launch Dec. 9 with the space agency’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer science mission. The test-firing of the Falcon 9 rocket occurred at 12:18 p.m. EST (1718 GMT) on pad 39A at the Florida spaceport. SpaceX rolled the rocket, without ...

Engineers only get one shot at making a spacecraft work as intended.  Or at least they only get one shot in space.  In the preparation leading up to that final, climactic moment, there are typically thousands of hours of tests run on numerous systems and subsystems.  If all goes well, it bodes well for the mission’s overall success, but if ...