Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space – Page 178

Astronomers know of about 60 rocky exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. When they try to determine how habitable these planets might be, detecting water in their atmospheres plays a huge role. But what if there was another way of measuring the water content in these worlds?

Researchers are developing a way of modeling these worlds to determine how much water they have.

Habitability likely requires , as far as we can tell. But detecting water is next to impossible. The next best thing is to use the tools we have—like the James Webb Space Telescope—to detect and characterize exoplanet atmospheres. But despite the JWST’s power, it can’t examine every exoplanet atmosphere. Some are beyond its reach. But one team of researchers is using what we do know about exoplanets, tidal heating, and radiogenic heating to try to determine which exoplanets might have oceans, either on the surface or under the surface.

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NASA has been laser-beamed data from millions of miles away — and it was a message the agency sent itself.

In a press release, the NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech said that it has achieved “first light” laser communication via its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which was launched last month on the Psyche spacecraft that’s currently making its way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The experiment’s main focus is seeing how viable optical communications, or data transmitted via freakin laser beams, can be as we as a species properly enter our spacefaring age. And by all accounts, it was a resounding success.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has alluded to an upcoming “tap to park” feature for the automaker’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta. While it isn’t clear when it’s expected to become available, some have already pointed out how useful such a feature could be.

On Friday, Musk responded to a post on X saying that Tesla is developing a feature in which the car identifies potential parking space options, letting users tap the one they want to use. Upon doing so, the driver will then be able to leave the vehicle before the vehicle parks in the selected space.

The statement came in response to another post claiming that a 360-degree bird’s eye view would be irrelevant in a world of self-driving vehicles, as the driver wouldn’t need to do anything at all for the vehicle to locate and park in a specific spot.

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A recent study published in Nature Astronomy uses a new method to challenge previous studies regarding the discoveries of the first exomoons around two exoplanets, Kepler-1708b and Kepler-1625b, located approximately 5,436 and 7,534 light-years from Earth, respectively. This study was conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the Sonnenberg Observatory and holds the potential to develop new observational methods in identifying and confirming the existence of exomoons throughout the cosmos.

Artist illustration of an exomoon orbiting a gas giant. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“Exomoons are so far away that we cannot see them directly, even with the most powerful modern telescopes,” said Dr. René Heller, who is an astrophysicist at Max Planck and lead author of the study.

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Scientists have developed a model to better understand the physics of the powerful superflares emitted by stars far beyond our solar system.

Solar flares, which are rapid and strong bursts of energy and radiation that originate from the Sun’s surface, are known to be emitted into space by our Sun.

NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions, however, have discovered several stars may produce superflares that are 100–10,000 times brighter than those emitted by our Sun.

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The Hubble Space Telescope recently suffered a glitch that made it go into safe mode, so it has not been collecting new science data since November 23. But on Friday, December 8, NASA will attempt to get the telescope up and running again by tweaking the operation of one of its three gyros.

The gyros are responsible for keeping the telescope pointed in the right direction, and an error in one of them put the telescope into safe mode to prevent any damage occurring to its hardware. Although it is theoretically possible for the telescope to operate with just one gyro, this would be less efficient and observing time would be lost as it would take longer for the telescope to switch between targets. So ideally, all three gyros can be operational.

The problem with the telescope was first shared on November 29, when NASA announced it was performing tests to understand the issue. Now, the tests are complete and NASA plans to resume operations. “After analyzing the data, the team has determined science operations can resume under three-gyro control,” NASA wrote in a new update. “Based on the performance observed during the tests, the team has decided to operate the gyros in a higher-precision mode during science observations. Hubble’s instruments and the observatory itself remain stable and in good health.”

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The young man quickly replied, “Aliens will never invade Earth because it’s trash.”

“Total trash,” his sister confirmed.

They seemed as sure of that as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West. To them, our planet has become nothing more than a cosmic landfill in our galaxy, populated with the worst that humanity can offer. Aliens, they assured me, would no more come here than we would jump into a vat of raw sewage.

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