Lifeboat Foundation

After a relatively low period of solar activity, the Sun sprung back into action yesterday, May 16. A near-X-class solar flare eruption occurred on the southeastern limb of the Sun. Even as the explosion was on the horizon of the Sun and a part of it was eclipsed due to its edge, the solar flare had a major impact on the Earth. Ultraviolet radiation ionized the upper atmosphere and caused a shortwave radio blackout over North America and the northern parts of South America. And now, fears are rising over another major solar storm that could be headed toward the Earth.

As per a SpaceWeather.com report, “Earth-orbiting satellites detected an M9.6-class solar flare from a sunspot hiding behind the sun’s southeastern limb. It was only percentage points away from being an X-flare. The event could herald a period of renewed solar activity as the sunspot turns toward Earth”.

The radio blackout was so severe that several reports highlighted that most of the shortwave frequencies faded away when the flare erupted. This would have affected mariners, amateur radio operators, and aviators. The blackout persisted for about an hour before subsiding.

This article gives a clear and chilling assessment of the impact of the Ukraine conflict on the future of collaborative space exploration; in doing so it highlights how humankind’s habitual tendency towards wars severally slow, if not completely halt, our urgent reach for the stars. As that old warrior Churchill once said„ ‘Jaw, jaw is always better than War, war!’

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions homeless and displaced and billions of dollars of damage in infrastructure. The conflict has also had less immediate but significant impacts on other areas, including on the space industries of Ukraine and Russia, but also globally in terms of the launch market, spaceflight activity and international cooperation.

In the wake of the start of the conflict on Feb. 24, 2022, and resulting international backlash against Russia, the then-head of the Russian space agency Dmitry Rogozin threatened to end its cooperation with the West on the International Space Station (ISS) program over sanctions imposed on Russia. He also issued a threat to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk for the company’s role in providing connectivity through its Starlink satellites.

SpaceX launched a batch of 56 Starlink satellites into orbit early Sunday from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and successfully landed a rocket in the sea.

This animation was created by using one day’s worth of data from Europe’s Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1) between March 18–19, 2023. Images of the full Earth disc are produced by MTG-I1 every 10 minutes. Credit: EUMETSAT/ESA

The Meteosat Third Generation Imager-1 (MTG-I1) was launched on an Ariane 5 rocket on Dec. 13, 2022, and is the first of a new generation of satellites set to revolutionize weather forecasting in Europe, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

Ocean microplastics have become a major source of concern, especially since they are so hard to track down, but researchers found an ingenious solution using satellites.

Ocean plastics have become a major source of concern for evironmental conservationists and public health professionals in recent years, and there hasn’t been a good way to track how these plastics are moving or their concentrations. But now, researchers from the University of Michigan have developed an ingenious way to track the ebb and flow of these microplastics around the world thanks to NASA satellites.

Solarseven/iStock.

Continue reading “Researchers find ingenious solution to map ocean plastics from orbit” »

As per the company, traditional rovers may not be able to traverse everywhere and perform tasks like their drone-like hopper.

For decades, Earth’s natural satellite has been one of the most popular destinations for space exploration. The upcoming Artemis missions, along with the excitement on establishing a human settlement on the Moon, have collectively boosted the lunar economy market substantially in recent years.

Several startups have been preparing to offer their technological solutions to gain a better understanding of the valuable resources available and provide services to future astronauts.

A SpaceX rocket carrying more than four dozen Starlink satellites launched early Wednesday afternoon from the California coast.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off just after 1 p.m. California time from Vandenberg Space Force Base northwest of Santa Barbara. The rocket carried 51 Starlink internet satellites into low-Earth orbit.

Continue reading “SpaceX Rocket Launches 51 Starlink Satellites Into Orbit, Lands Rocket on Ship at Sea” »

Europe’s newest weather satellite has snapped an image of the Earth that reveals our planet’s incredible beauty, despite gathering clouds.

The image taken by Meteosat Third Generation — Imager 1 (MTG-I1) shows conditions over Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic to an incredible level of detail and demonstrates that the satellite is set to live up to its promise of revolutionizing weather forecasting including the prediction of severe weather.

They’re not a common thing right now, but the technology of solar sails has recently had some success. In particular, it’s had success in exactly the way JPL has been proposing it be used more—in combination with CubeSats. From 2019 to 2022, a crowdfunded CubeSat project called LightSail 2 run by The Planetary Society “successfully used sunlight alone to change its orbit around Earth,” according to the Society’s website. And just recently, NASA launched a sail-powered CubeSat called Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout as part of the Artemis I mission.

So, with recent functional missions to point to and inside knowledge of what it takes to complete a successful space mission—from engineering marvels to monetary considerations—the team from JPL is pitching we make a lot more use of this pairing through what they call the Sundiver concept.

“Together, small satellites with lightweight instruments and solar sails offer affordable access to deep regions of the solar system, also making it possible to realize hard-to-reach trajectories that are not constrained to the ecliptic plane,” the preprint reads. “Combining these two technologies can drastically reduce travel times within the solar system, while delivering robust science.”