Lifeboat Foundation

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) is preparing for the second flight of its Vulcan Centaur rocket this week. The mission will see Vulcan carry an inert payload to orbit alongside some experiments and demonstrations and will complete its certification process with the U.S. Space Force (USSF).

SpaceX has delayed missions this week following an off-nominal deorbit burn of a Falcon 9 second stage following the Crew-9 mission. The stage landed in the South Pacific Ocean but outside of the defined reentry corridor. While the team investigates, the company has rescheduled Monday’s planned launch of its OneWeb mission out of Vandenberg to next week, while a Starlink mission will now fly from the Cape this week on Saturday, Oct. 5.

Continue reading “Launch Roundup: Vulcan ready for second flight; Hera mission set to study asteroid” »

“It’s a known phenomenon, but it was never fully understood,” said Yukun Liu, the study’s first author and a Ph.D. candidate in Dravid’s laboratory. “Because you really need to be able to combine the direct visualization of water generation and the structure analysis at the atomic scale in order to figure out what’s happening with the reaction and how to optimize it.”

But viewing the process with atomic precision was simply impossible—until nine months ago. In January 2024, Dravid’s team unveiled a novel method to analyze gas molecules in real time. Dravid and his team developed an ultra-thin glassy membrane that holds gas molecules within honeycomb-shaped nanoreactors, so they can be viewed within high-vacuum transmission electron microscopes.

With the new technique, previously published in Science Advances, researchers can examine samples in atmospheric pressure gas at a resolution of just 0.102 nanometers, compared to a 0.236-nanometer resolution using other state-of-the-art tools. The technique also enabled, for the first time, concurrent spectral and reciprocal information analysis.

A Spanish biotech company sees the carbon material as a way to power the brain-computer interfaces of the future.

In 2020, the team reported evidence of this rare form of decay being detected by the experiment. Now, after far more collisions, including higher-energy collisions, the team reports a 5-sigma detection, meaning there is a 0.00006 percent chance that the detection is a statistical fluke.

“With this measurement, K⁺ → π⁺νṽ becomes the rarest decay established at discovery level – the famous 5 sigma,” Cristina Lazzeroni, Professor in Particle Physics at the University of Birmingham, said in a statement. “This difficult analysis is the result of excellent teamwork, and I am extremely proud of this new result.”

Continue reading “Incredibly Rare 13 In 100 Billion Event Seen At CERN Particle Accelerator” »

Scientists at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory have overcome a major hurdle in sodium-ion battery development.

The Parker Solar Probe is about to undergo its seventh encounter with Venus on its journey towards the Sun. Here’s how fast it’ll go.

Because distracted drivers in a 6,660lb vehicle is a great idea.

Each Monday, I pick out North America’s celestial highlights for the week ahead. This coming week includes a naked-eye comet and an annular solar eclipse.

American start-up Boom Supersonic is planning to develop the very first supersonic aircraft powered by 100% sustainable fuel. The aircraft, named Overture, would succeed Concorde in providing ultrafast connections between Europe and the United States, more than 20 years after the latter ceased operation. The new aircraft also echoes its predecessor’s unique, long and slender design.

Boom Supersonic is currently flying a demonstrator, the XB-1, over the Mojave Desert in California. A first supersonic flight (at Mach 1) is now expected by the end of 2024, following the green light given from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). All these tests are designed to ensure the aircraft’s reliability and maneuverability. Above all, they lay the foundations for the firm’s future Overture plane.