Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 24

A New Compact Instrument Enables High-Fidelity Measurements of Energetic Particles on CubeSats

Successfully launched on July 23, 2025, the REAL instrument can distinguish between these potential modes, making it possible to investigate their relative importance and determine which, if any, waves are responsible for electron fallout. Leveraging recent advancements in sensor miniaturization, the instrument includes three sensor heads — a low-, medium-, and high-energy head with two, five, and four simultaneous look directions, respectively — integrated with four electronic boards. Together, they occupy only about half of the REAL CubeSat and use a time resolution sufficient to resolve microbursts of electrons with energies ranging from 40 keV up to 2 MeV. As its parent 3U CubeSat flies in LEO, REAL points along Earth’s magnetic field and can simultaneously measure the quantity, energy, and angle of the particles as they fall into the atmosphere — a first-of-its-kind capability.

“Most CubeSats can observe particles from only a single direction, so they have to spin in order to build up a full picture — and that takes a few seconds, too slow to capture microbursts,” said space physicist Robyn Millan of Dartmouth College, who serves as the REAL mission principal investigator. “With REAL, we’ve managed to squeeze three sensors, each with multiple look directions, into the top of this 100-by-100-millimeter head, allowing us to capture those measurements all at once. We’re really proud of that.”

The high-energy head consists of a 30-millimeter-thick aluminum collimator with four apertures, each spanning 20 degrees of pitch angle. Each aperture connects to an active area on a solid-state detector (SSD) at the base. The medium-energy head similarly uses an SSD base but instead employs five active areas that connect to a 22-millimeter-thick aluminum collimator with five apertures, each spanning 20 degrees of pitch angle. The low-energy head, on the other hand, is a miniature electrostatic analyzer (ESA) consisting of titanium electrodes sandwiched between etched silicon selector slits. These lie on top of a microchannel plate (MCP). The low-energy head uses 36 apertures, two look directions (±40 degrees), and 15 channels to measure electrons with lower energies, from 1 keV to 40 keV.

Astronomers Find Escaping Helium on Rocky World LHS 1140 b

By detecting helium escaping into space, astronomers have found the first direct evidence of an atmosphere on LHS 1,140 b, a rocky exoplanet located in its star’s habitable zone.

A collaborative team of researchers recently announced the discovery of an atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star. While this finding is intriguing for the search for life beyond Earth, the atmosphere is not only comprised of helium, but it was found to be escaping the exoplanet. The researchers discuss these findings in a recent study published in the journal Science and it holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of rocky exoplanets while narrowing the search for life beyond Earth.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data about LHS 1,140 b, which orbits a red dwarf star about 50 light-years from Earth and has a radius and mass about 1.7 and 5.6 of Earth, respectively, designating LHS 1,140 b as a super-Earth. While the researchers note this is the first time an atmosphere has been detected around a rocky exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, LHS 1,140 b’s atmosphere is primarily comprised of helium and was also found to be escaping the exoplanet or being stripped away.

This is because red dwarf stars have been found to be significantly more active than Sun-like stars, meaning its intense radiation is potentially stripping LHS 1,140 b’s upper atmosphere where the helium is found. Despite this, the team noted other types of gases could be present in the lower altitudes of the atmosphere.

A tiny universe in a bottle reveals clues to the origins of life

Researchers have created cosmic dust from scratch by recreating space-like conditions inside glass tubes. The dust contains complex carbon-rich molecules built from elements essential to life and produces infrared signals similar to real material found in space. By studying these laboratory samples, scientists can explore how organic chemistry unfolds around stars and how comets, asteroids and meteorites may have carried those ingredients to Earth.

Japan space probe skims asteroid in test for planetary defense

A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks.

The fridge-sized Hayabusa2 was due to fly within 800 meters (0.5 miles) of asteroid Torifune, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists said earlier, a trial run to see whether such a probe could deflect a potentially dangerous space rock away from Earth.

The mission comes after NASA deliberately smashed a spacecraft into the 160-meter-wide (525-foot-wide) Dimorphos asteroid in 2022, successfully altering its orbit around a larger space rock.

Scientists are Teaching Shrimp to Eat in Microgravity for Future Moon Bases

As far as we know, food doesn’t exist naturally in space. We have to bring it with us if we want to explore the final frontier. One of the oldest and most common types of food on planet Earth is seafood, yet we know surprisingly little about how aquatic animals would react to the microgravity environment they would experience in space. A new paper by researchers at Japan’s Okayama University of Science, which was recently published in Microgravity Science and Technology, hopes to tackle that question. It used a novel way to simulate microgravity to watch how crustaceans would react to the space environment, and found that they could likely be good candidates as part of a future space food chain.

Most microgravity experiments on Earth take place in drop chambers or parabolic flights — both of which only offer a few seconds of true “microgravity”, and aren’t suitable for longer duration testing. The International Space Station offers an alternative, but is extremely expensive and has very limited space to run additional experiments. So the researchers turned to an alternative tool — the clinostat.

These specialized chambers rapidly change the orientation their contents are subjected to, varying the gravity field they experience and mimicking at least some of the effects of microgravity. They rotate in such a way that the combination of gravity and centrifugal force will eventually come out to essentially zero over a period of time. These machines work well for single-celled organisms and plants. But they’re not as effective for complex animals.

Saturn’s moon Titan runs the same weather cycle as Earth rivers and seas liquid doing all the work is methane, and the bedrock underfoot is water frozen at nearly minus 180 degrees, harder than most stone on Earth

Saturn’s largest moon runs a full hydrological cycle — clouds, storms, rivers, lakes, seas — but the rain is liquid methane and the bedrock is water ice frozen to about minus 179 Celsius, hard enough to build mountains from.

Webb telescope discovers hidden planet in famous star system

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a giant planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet, hiding within one of the most intensely studied planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy.

The young, nearby star Beta Pictoris was already known to host two giant planets: Beta Pictoris b, one of the first exoplanets ever directly imaged, and Beta Pictoris c. The newly identified Beta Pictoris d makes it only the second planetary system known to contain at least three imaged planets.

Unlike Beta Pictoris b and c, however, Beta Pictoris d was discovered not by identifying a bright point of light but by detecting the unique chemical fingerprint of its atmosphere, a technique that could transform the search for worlds around other stars.