Lifeboat Foundation

Now, though, new research is helping us understand this strange dusty environment and paving the way for safer Mars missions in the future — like a crewed landing and possibly even a permanent settlement.

The problem of dust

Mars’s surface is covered in fine particles of dust. With its smaller size than Earth, it has lower gravity – around one-third of the gravity here – and a thinner atmosphere, which is around one percent of the density of Earth’s atmosphere. That means it is easy for winds to form and to pick up those dust particles, blowing them into a dust storm.

The sunspot, called AR2975, has been shooting out flares of electrically charged particles from the sun’s plasma soup since Monday (March 28). Sunspots are areas on the sun’s surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares, or explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Related: Strange new type of solar wave defies physics

Cannibal coronal mass ejections happen when fast-moving solar eruptions overtake earlier eruptions in the same region of space, sweeping up charged particles to form a giant, combined wavefront that triggers a powerful geomagnetic storm.

PANORAMA Design Group bagged the 2021 Asia-Pacific Space Designers Association (APSDA) Gold Prize in the Entertainment & Leisure category with their project, Physical 2.0. Combining the two popular social activities among young people, Physical 2.0 aims to create a novel experience for fitness with clubbing elements.

“Our pleasure to receive many recognitions in the inaugural APSDA Awards,” said PANORAMA Design Group. “It’s a solid confirmation for the values and unique experience PANORAMA has created for the users in different spatial typologies.”

WASHINGTON — SpiderOak Mission Systems announced March 29 it won a contract from Lockheed Martin Space for its cybersecurity software.

The contract allows Lockheed Martin to use SpiderOak’s OrbitSecure software. “This is commercial technology that was developed for terrestrial applications and has been repurposed for the space business, specifically for low Earth orbit,” SpiderOak chairman Charles Beames told SpaceNews.

Beames said he could not disclose the value of the contract with Lockheed Martin. “The goal is to make OrbitSecure available to Lockheed Martin customers as part of an offering to provide an extra level of cybersecurity,” he said.

Researchers lay out a framework explaining how methane could be a biosignature rather than a false alarm.

If an exoplanet’s atmosphere contains methane, that could be a sign of life — as long as planetary conditions meet certain criteria. The framework for those conditions has now been established in a new study by researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

My science fiction short story has been reprinted by Metastellar. The piece previously appeared in Theme of Absence magazine. It’s a quick read, but it packs a punch, so I encourage you to check it out!

An unusual rendezvous takes place in outer space. The synthetic creature known as Honeybee brings a young man’s soul to her lover, an entity called the Blot. Yet Honeybee begins to question her rel…

HB11 is approaching nuclear fusion from an entirely new angle, using high power, high precision lasers instead of hundred-million-degree temperatures to start the reaction. Its first demo has produced 10 times more fusion reactions than expected, and the company says it’s now “the only commercial entity to achieve fusion so far,” making it “the global frontrunner in the race to commercialize the holy grail of clean energy.”

We’ve covered Australian company HB11’s hydrogen-boron laser fusion innovations before in detail, but it’s worth briefly summarizing what makes this company so different from the rest of the field. In order to smash atoms together hard enough to make them fuse together and form a new element, you need to overcome the incredibly strong repulsive forces that push two positively-charged nuclei apart. It’s like throwing powerful magnets at each other in space, hoping to smash two north poles together instead of having them just dance out of each other’s way.

The Sun accomplishes this by having a huge amount of hydrogen atoms packed into a plasma that’s superheated to tens of millions of degrees at its core. Heat is a measure of kinetic energy – how fast a group of atoms or molecules are moving or vibrating. At these temperatures, the hydrogen atoms are moving so fast that they smack into each other and fuse, releasing the energy that warms our planet.

Spreading its mirror wings was the telescope’s last big step in its complicated deployment.

NASA has pulled off the most technically audacious part of bringing its newest flagship observatory online: unfolding it.

On Saturday, Jan. 8, the operations team for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) announced that the observatory’s primary mirror had successfully unfolded its segments — the last major step of the telescope’s complicated deployment.

Continue reading “James Webb Space Telescope unfolds mirrors, completes deployment” »

CSI: Milky Way

Astronomers dig into some forensic archaeology to determine how the Milky Way got its current shape after a series of mergers.