Lifeboat Foundation

A NASA planetary defense exercise had astronomers quickly detect a threat. How did they do?

Earthly space travelers have been trying to perfect orbital botany for a while now. Stable, sustainable off world agricultural practices are needed to make longer term exploration missions possible, and though the International Space Station (ISS) has seen a few successful low-orbit gardening endeavors, all have used some sort of soil or soil-replacing growth media.

Now, thanks to NASA Flight Engineer Jessica Watkins, that could be starting to change. According to a NASA blog published last week, Watkins has begun to harvest radishes and mizuna greens aboard the ISS — grown without any soil whatsoever.

Growing any edible plants in space is always exciting, but using dirt-like growth materials presents potential resource, mess, and sanitation problems. And that’s why Watkins’ triumphant soilless crop could be a thrilling step towards a new age of interstellar discovery.

Eric KlienAdmin.

The U.S. government discouraging the opening of new mines is duplicating the problem that Europe had with energy and Russia. (It takes 10 years to get a new mine approved in the U.S.)

Omuterema AkhahendaAdmin.

Continue reading “Kenya’s $100 billion hidden mineral deposits” »

“So fascinating and yet scary how unfathomably vast space is,” comments a user.

A marvelous animation takes those who view it on an illuminating adventure through outer space, beyond the Milky Way and ultimately to the edge of the known universe. Included in the journey are stunning revelations about the difficult-to-comprehend nature of distances measured in light years.

Pedram Roushan, from Google’s Quantum AI team in California, describes this elusive form of matter – and how it could be simulated on the company’s Sycamore quantum processor.

With their enchanting beauty, crystalline solids have captivated us for centuries. Crystals, which range from snowflakes to diamonds, are made up of atoms or molecules that are regularly arranged in space. They have provided foundational insights that led to the development of the quantum theory of solids. Crystals have also helped develop a framework for understanding other spatially ordered phases, such as superconductors, liquid crystals and ferromagnets.

Periodic oscillations are another ubiquitous phenomenon. They appear at all scales, ranging from atomic oscillations to orbiting planets. For many years, we used them to mark the passage of time, and they even made us ponder the possibility of perpetual motion. What is common between these periodic patterns – either in space or time – is that they lead to systems with reduced symmetries. Without periodicity, any position in space, or any instance of time, is indistinguishable from any other. Periodicity breaks the translational symmetry of space or time.

The crater could help identify the (probably Chinese) rocket.

LRO just identified a crater formed by the rocket booster that crashed into the far side of the Moon in March.

China is set to make history when it finally completes the construction of its Space Station ‘Tiangong’ and makes it operational this year.

It will be the only country to have its own space station and perhaps the only one in the world after the International Space Station (ISS) retires sometime at the end of this decade.

An image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a galaxy cluster named Abell 1,351, so unimaginably massive it is bending space-time itself.

Now look out past the sun, way beyond. Most of the stars harbor planets of their own. Astronomers have spotted thousands of these distant star-and-planet systems. But strangely, they have so far found none that remotely resemble ours. So the puzzle has grown harder: Why these, and why those?

The swelling catalog of extrasolar planets, along with observations of distant, dusty planet nurseries and even new data from our own solar system, no longer matches classic theories about how planets are made. Planetary scientists, forced to abandon decades-old models, now realize there may not be a grand unified theory of world-making—no single story that explains every planet around every star, or even the wildly divergent orbs orbiting our sun. “The laws of physics are the same everywhere, but the process of building planets is sufficiently complicated that the system becomes chaotic,” said Alessandro Morbidelli, a leading figure in planetary formation and migration theories and an astronomer at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France.

Still, the findings are animating new research. Amid the chaos of world-building, patterns have emerged, leading astronomers toward powerful new ideas. Teams of researchers are working out the rules of dust and pebble assembly and how planets move once they coalesce. Fierce debate rages over the timing of each step, and over which factors determine a budding planet’s destiny. At the nexus of these debates are some of the oldest questions humans have asked ourselves: How did we get here? Is there anywhere else like here?