Lifeboat Foundation

It’s part of a wider project aimed at investigating dangerous solar eruptions.

China is building the world’s largest array of telescopes designed to study the Sun, a report from the South China Morning Post.

The array, called the Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope (DSRT), will help scientists better understand coronal mass ejections — massive solar eruptions that have the potential to knock out the world’s internet and disrupt global satellite services.

Continue reading “China’s new radio telescope will have dangerous solar eruptions in its gaze” »

Isn’t it beautiful? This is an illustrated logarithmic scale conception of the observable Universe with the Solar System at the centre.

Whether NASA likes it or not, humans eventually will be having space sex. This will pose many challenges, from cleanliness to pregnancy.

In 1,885, King Oscar II of Sweden announced a public challenge consisting of four mathematical problems. The French polymath Henri Poincaré focused on one related to the motion of celestial bodies, the so-called n-body problem. Will our solar system continue its clocklike motion indefinitely, will the planets fly off into the void, or will they collapse into a fiery solar death?

Poincaré’s solution — which indicated that at least some systems, like the sun, Earth and moon, were stable — won the prestigious prize, and an accompanying article was printed for distribution in 1889. Unfortunately, his solution was incorrect.

Poincaré admitted his error and paid to have the copies of his solution destroyed (which cost more than the prize money). A month later, he submitted a corrected version. He now saw that even a system with only three bodies could behave too unpredictably — too chaotically — to be modeled. So began the field of dynamical systems.

Yes, Jupiter has rings!

New James Webb Space Telescope images show off Jupiter, the Great Red Spot, two moons, and the planet’s faint rings.

It’s been over a month since we last updated our blog about our winter warrior, currently around 96 million miles away. At present the team is preparing for Ingenuity’s next flight, which could take place as early as this weekend. This 30th sortie will be a short hop – which will check out our system’s health after surviving 101 sols of winter, collect landing delivery data in support of NASA’s Mars Sample Return Campaign, and potentially clear off dust that has settled on our solar panel since Flight 29.

What’s Happened Lately

It’s still winter at Jezero Crater, which means overnight temperatures are as low as -124 degrees Fahrenheit (−86 Celsius). Winter at Mars also means the amount of solar energy hitting our solar panel remains below what is needed to maintain charge in our batteries both day and night. However, during the day the panel continues to create enough charge to make shorter hops possible. That’s what we did on Flight 29 and is our plan for Flight 30.

Findings suggest it is possible to treat soil and water on Mars for farming.

Tesla Autopilot is now enabling the car to perceive the space around it thanks to the development of its Occupancy Networks.

The James Webb Space Telescope team is still flexing its ability to capture detailed images close to home. Webb has snapped a pair of near-infrared photos showing Jupiter’s polar auroras. You can also see the planet’s extremely faint rings and two of its smaller moons, Amalthea (the bright spot to the far left) and Adrastea (the dot at the left edge of the central ring).

The pictures were taken using NIRCam’s widefield view on July 27th. As for the trippy visuals? Astronomers created composites using several images produced with filters mapped to multiple colors (particularly visible in the image below). The Great Red Spot and other cloud formations are white as they reflect large amounts of sunlight.

The James Webb crew didn’t just create these images for the sake of bragging rights. The observations should provide more insights into Jupiter’s “inner life,” according to the European Space Agency. That, in turn, could help scientists understand the behavior of gas giants beyond the Solar System. In other words, Webb’s data could soon prove useful on multiple levels.