Lifeboat Foundation

The commercial space industry recently received a boost after NASA awarded 10 small businesses up to $150,000 each as part of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Ignite program, granting each company six months to demonstrate the viability and additional standards of their mission proposals. This funding comes as part of the second round of Phase I awards and holds the potential to continue the development of the commercial space industry for the short-and long-term.

“The investments we’re able to offer through SBIR Ignite give us the ability to de-risk technologies that have a strong commercial pull, helping make them more attractive to outside investors, customers, and partners,” said Jason L. Kessler, who is the Program Executive for the NASA SBIR & Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program. “We also hope it advances the sometimes-overlooked goal of all SBIR programs to increase private-sector commercialization of the innovations derived from federal research and development funding.”

The 10 companies selected for this latest round of funding include (in alphabetical order): Astral Forge LLC, Astrobotic Technology Inc., Benchmark Space Systems, Brayton Energy LLC, Channel-Logistics LLC dba Space-Eyes, GeoVisual Analytics, Lunar Resources Inc., Space Lab Technologies LLC, Space Tango, and VerdeGo Aero.

Meteorologists on Earth struggle to predict the weather, but what about scientists trying to predict the weather on exoplanets that are light-years from Earth? This is what a recently accepted study to The Astrophysical Journal Supplement hopes to unveil as an international team of researchers used data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to conduct a three-year investigation into weather patterns on WASP-121 b, which is a “hot Jupiter” that orbits its star in just over one day and located approximately 880 light-years from Earth. This study holds the potential to not only advance our understanding of exoplanets and their atmospheres, but also how we study them, as well.

Artist impression of WASP-121 b orbiting its host star. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STSci))

“The assembled dataset represents a significant amount of observing time for a single planet and is currently the only consistent set of such repeated observations,” said Dr. Quentin Changeat, who is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at University College London and lead author of the study. “The information that we extracted from those observations was used to infer the chemistry, temperature, and clouds of the atmosphere of WASP-121 b at different times. This provided us with an exquisite picture of the planet changing over time.”

New observations of the Small Magellanic Cloud show that it might actually be two galaxies disguised as one.

The Juno spacecraft’s instruments will help scientists better understand volcanic activity on the volatile moon’s surface.

A recent paper suggests our understanding of the cosmos is wrong and proposes a different model. Could this new idea be right? In a word: No.

The recently detected gravitational waves are a muddled mix of various sources, new study finds.

From robotic lunar landers perusing the surface to an astronaut flyby, 2024 could be the year NASA makes its big return to the moon.

Earth will be struck today by a coronal mass ejection from a huge solar flare that erupted from the sun on New Year’s Eve.

The New Year’s Eve flare created a CME, a huge bubble of plasma from a region of the sun called the corona, which is equivalent to the sun’s outer atmosphere, and this has an Earth-directed component. Though this massive ejection of plasma will only graze the magnetic bubble surrounding our planet Tuesday (Jan. 2), the magnetosphere, it could trigger a geomagnetic storm that could affect communications and power infrastructure.

The coronal mass ejection CME was hurled into space by an X-class solar flare that burst from the surface of the sun at 4:55 p.m. EST (2155 GMT) on Sunday (Dec. 31). It is the most powerful flare that has happened on the sun during the current solar cycle, solar cycle 25, which began in Dec. 2019. In fact, the flare that ended 2023 with a bang is the largest that has been observed since Sept. 10, 2017, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

(NewsNation) —A NASA probe will fly within nearly 4 million miles of the sun’s surface.

The probe is expected to pass the sun 3.8 million miles from its surface on Christmas Eve this year, BBC News reported.

“This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity,” Parker project scientist Dr Nour Raouafi told BBC News. “This is equivalent to the Moon landing of 1969.”