Lifeboat Foundation

“Part of what we’re doing is conceptually simple, reflecting sunlight to a solar panel located in the dark,” said Maxar Chief Robotics Architect and lead for Light Bender Sean Dougherty in a Maxar statement. “Where it gets complex is doing that without humans involved. We’re leveraging investments in autonomy to study how NASA can use robots to assemble and deploy a set of reflectors that keep sunlight focused on a solar panel operating in the shadows. It’s never been done before.”

Light Bender works by hoisting two 33-foot (10-meter) reflectors up a 65-foot (20-meter) telescoping mast. One mirror autonomously tracks the sun and reflects that light to the second mirror, which then reflects those rays towards the intended solar panels.

The Light Bender project is a collaboration between Maxar and NASA’s Langley Research Center, and is scheduled for its first terrestrial demonstration in 2025. The company was awarded the contract in May 2023, under NASA’s Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity Program. For their part, NASA’s team is responsible for Light Bender’s structural design, and Maxar is taking the lead on the robotics — an aptitude for which the company has demonstrated in the past.

The very fabric of the universe is ringing with gravitational waves from its earliest epoch, and researchers have finally “heard” this cosmic symphony.

On Thursday, June 28, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) revealed the detection of low-frequency gravitational waves, a historic breakthrough that represents 15 years of searching. Yet, this isn’t the first time that humanity has detected gravitational waves. Scientists have been detecting these ripples in the fabric of space using facilities like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) since 2015.

Because of a peculiar effect velocity has on the appearance of the passage of time, our observations make it seem like time ran slower when the Universe was just a baby.

At least, that’s how it appears to us, at a light travel time of nearly 13 billion years away. This is called time dilation, and astrophysicist Geraint Lewis of the University of Sydney in Australia and statistician Brendon Brewer of the University of Auckland have seen it in the early Universe for the first time by studying the fluctuations of bright galaxies called quasar galaxies during the Cosmic Dawn.

Continue reading “Time Appears to Have Run 5 Times Slower in The Early Universe” »

Hot off the Press! Interview on Progressive vs Degenerative Research Programmes with Leslie Allan!

Progressive research programs, like daring astronauts, catapult us into the vast unknown, making bold, untested predictions that stretch the fabric of our comprehension. Degenerative programs, in contrast, linger in well-trodden territories, shoring up existing knowledge with complex embellishments rather than breaking new ground. Yet, like celestial bodies in the cosmic ballet, each performs an essential role in the dance of discovery, together tracing the contours of the ever-expanding sphere of human understanding.

Continue reading “Progressive vs Degenerative Research Programmes wrapper” »

Four individuals have agreed to be sequestered inside a 1,700-square-foot simulated Mars habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center to study what it would be like to live on the Red Planet and how humans can learn to cope in that extreme environment.

During their 378-day stay, which officially kicked off earlier this week, they’ll have a surprisingly busy schedule, including a strict exercise regimen as well as a lengthy list of duties, from performing simulated spacewalks to growing crops.

In other words, it’s a demanding job that’s bound to be tough on the crew of four.

Our ideas about the universe are based on a century-old simplification known as the cosmological principle. It suggests that when averaged on large scales, the Cosmos is homogeneous and matter is distributed evenly throughout.

This allows a mathematical description of space-time that simplifies the application of Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the universe as a whole.

Our cosmological models are based on this assumption. But as new telescopes, both on Earth and in space, deliver ever more precise images, and astronomers discover massive objects such as the giant arc of quasars, this foundation is increasingly challenged.

Ingenuity phones home after being silen for two months.

Elusive neutrinos reveal a portrait of our galaxy unlike any before.

Astronomers for the first time detected neutrinos that originated within our local galaxy using a new technique.