Lifeboat Foundation

Venus has always been a bit of the odd stepchild in the solar system. It’s similarities to Earth are uncanny: roughly the same size, mass, and distance from the sun. But the development paths the two planets ended up taking were very different, with one being the birthplace of all life as we know it, and the other becoming a cloud-covered, highly pressurized version of hell. That cloud cover, which is partially made up of sulfuric acid, has also given the planet an air of mystery. So much so that astronomers in the early 20th century speculated that there could be dinosaurs roaming about on the surface.

Some of that mystery will melt away if a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory gets a chance to launch their newest idea for a mission to the planet, the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topograph, and Spectroscopy (or VERITAS) mission.

Continue reading “More Details On NASA’s VERITAS Mission, Which Could Go to Venus” »

Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides every square meter of Earth — when it’s in direct sunlight — with a constant ~1500 W of power, enough to keep our planet at a comfortable temperature for liquid water to continuously exist on its surface. Just like the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy amidst the trillions of galaxies in the Universe, our Sun shines continuously, varying only slightly over time.

But without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Even in the extreme conditions found in the core of a massive star like our Sun, the nuclear reactions that power it could not occur without the bizarre properties that our quantum Universe demands. Thankfully, our Universe is quantum in nature, enabling the Sun and all the other stars to shine as they do. Here’s the science of how it works.

We hear a lot of talk about the possibility of intelligent E.T.s, but in this episode, neuroscientist Lori Marino gives us the nuts and bolts of what intelligence really is; how it manifests itself on our own Earth; and why intelligent aliens won’t necessarily need ginormous brains.

Three times in the coming month or so, rockets will light their engines and set course for Mars. A trio of nations — the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — will be sending robotic emissaries to the red planet, hoping to start new chapters of exploration there.

Each mission is a pioneer in its own right. The United States is sending its fifth rover, NASA’s most capable ever, in the hope of finding evidence of past life on Mars and collecting a set of rocks that will one day be the first samples flown back to Earth. China aims to build on its lunar-exploration successes by taking one of its rovers to Mars for the first time. And the UAE will be launching an orbiter — the first interplanetary mission by any Arab nation — as a test of its young but ambitious space agency.

It is far from a given that all these missions will make it; Mars is notorious as a graveyard for failed spacecraft. But if they do, they will substantially rewrite scientific understanding of the planet. The two rovers are heading for parts of Mars that have never been explored(see ‘Landing sites’), and the UAE’s orbiter will track the changing Martian atmosphere.

A team of researchers simulated conditions on water-rich exoplanets in the laboratory and learned something surprising about their geological composition.

Out beyond our solar system, visible only as the smallest dot in space with even the most powerful telescopes, other worlds exist. Many of these worlds, astronomers have discovered, may be much larger than Earth and completely covered in water — basically ocean planets with no protruding land masses. What kind of life could develop on such a world? Could a habitat like this even support life?

A team of researchers led by Arizona State University (ASU) recently set out to investigate those questions. And since they couldn’t travel to distant exoplanets to take samples, they decided to recreate the conditions of those water worlds in the laboratory. In this case, that laboratory was the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at the DOEs Argonne National Laboratory.

Physicists from the University of Glasgow and the University of Arizona have experimentally verified a half-century-old theory that began as speculation about how an advanced alien civilization could use a rotating black hole to generate energy.

A team of astronomers from Harvard and other institutions are collaborating on a new project to scan the skies for technological signatures from alien civilizations.

It’s a noteworthy new project, as it’s the first to receive a NASA grant for SETI-specific research in more than 30 years, according to a statement.

“Technosignatures relate to signatures of advanced alien technologies similar to, or perhaps more sophisticated than, what we possess,” said Avi Loeb, the chair of the Harvard astronomy department Harvard, in a statement. “Such signatures might include industrial pollution of atmospheres, city lights, photovoltaic cells (solar panels), megastructures, or swarms of satellites.”

Aliens & Black Holes

Penrose predicted that the object would acquire a negative energy in this unusual area of space. By dropping the object and splitting it in two so that one half falls into the black hole while the other is recovered, the recoil action would measure a loss of negative energy—effectively, the recovered half would gain energy extracted from the black hole’s rotation. The scale of the engineering challenge the process would require is so great, however, that Penrose suggested only a very advanced, perhaps alien, civilisation would be equal to the task.

Continue reading “Experiment confirms 50-year-old theory describing how an alien civilization could exploit a black hole” »

Administrator Jim Bridenstine, leadership and a panel of scientists and engineers will preview the upcoming mission at 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 17. Submit your questions during the briefing using #AskNASA!

Perseverance is a robotic scientist that will search for signs of past microbial life on Mars and characterize the planet’s climate and geology. It will also collect rock and soil samples for future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. The mission is scheduled to launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:15 a.m. EDT July 20. It will land at Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. #CountdownToMars