Lifeboat Foundation

Many believed Ingenuity would not soar to such heights.

NASA achieved a historic first in April last year when it performed the first-ever controlled flight of an aircraft on Mars. The Ingenuity helicopter, which hitched a ride to Mars aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, was designed as a proof-of-concept craft that was only expected to fly a total of five times.

Now, the Mars helicopter has achieved flight no. 35, and it has set a new altitude record in the process, reaching a height of 14 meters (46 feet) above the red planet’s surface, NASA announced on Twitter.

Continue reading “NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter just flew higher than ever before” »

Its resolution is 1.5 times better compared to state-of-the-art techniques.

Researchers developed a new technology to see very small molecules in 6D. Inspired by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) design, the latest technology uses mirror segments to sort and gather light on a microscopic scale and take three-dimensional images of molecules both in position and orientation.

Washington University in St. Louis.

Continue reading “A new type of microscope inspired by James Webb sees molecules in 6D” »

Two huge telescopes will provide the deepest and widest view of the cosmos to date.

Construction of the world’s biggest radio astronomy facility, the SKA Observatory, begins today. The observatory is a global project 30 years in the making.

Astronomers like me will use the telescopes to trace hydrogen over cosmic time and make precise measurements of gravity in extreme environments.

Continue reading “Largest radio observatory ever will reveal secrets of the universe” »

X-ray diffraction measurements under laser-driven dynamic compression allow researchers to investigate the atomic structure of matter at hundreds of thousands of atmospheres of pressure and temperatures of thousands of degrees, with broad implications for condensed matter physics, planetary science and astronomy.

Pressure determination in these experiments often relies on velocimetry measurements coupled with modeling that requires accurate knowledge of the optical and thermomechanical properties of a window material, resulting in significant systematic uncertainty.

In new research published in Physical Review B, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists report on a series of X-ray diffraction experiments on five metals dynamically compressed to 600 GPa (6,000,000 atmospheres of pressure). In addition to collecting atomic structure information for multiple compressed samples, the team demonstrated a different approach for pressure determination applicable to X-ray diffraction experiments under quasi-isentropic ramp compression.

The intercontinental Square Kilometer Array will comprise thousands of dishes to image vast swathes of the sky.

Scientists have failed to detect a key signal from space – and used it to explain some of the earliest parts of the universe.

The inability to pick up the signal has allowed researchers to better understand the first galaxies to exist. It is one of the first times they have been able to study the period known as the “cosmic dawn”, when the first stars and galaxies came into being.

Scientists are now able to place limits on the mass and energy coming out of those first stars and galaxies – using a counterintuitive method.

In the opening scenes of the new film “Good Night Oppy,” the Opportunity rover rolls along through Perseverance Valley on Mars in June 2018, as “Roam” by The B-52s fills the room at mission control.

The peppy tune was the rover’s wake-up song, played at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the same way NASA has used a song to wake up astronauts each day they spend in space since the 1960s, the Opportunity rover team began their daily shifts with a song that set the mood for “Oppy’s” journey.

But a storm brewing on the horizon changed everything.

Two new studies suggest that certain tetrahedral arrangements of galaxies outnumber their mirror images, potentially reflecting details of the universe’s birth. But confirmation is needed.

“What this new result does is provide a clearer picture of how our local universe has come together — it is telling us that at least in one of the large galaxies, there has been this sporadic feeding of small galaxies,” Lewis said in a press release.

Globular clusters are at the center of this research. They’re older associations of stars that have lower metallicity. There are at least 150 in the Milky Way, likely more. They play a role in the galactic evolution, but the role isn’t clearly understood. Globulars, as they’re known, are more prevalent in a galaxy’s halo, while their counterparts, open clusters, are found in the galactic disks.

The researchers behind this work identified a population of globulars in Andromeda’s inner halo that all have the same metallicity. Metallicity refers to the elemental makeup of stars, with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium referred to as metals in astronomy. The globulars have lower metallicity than most stars in the same region, meaning they came from elsewhere, not from Andromeda itself. It also means they’re older since there were fewer heavy elements in the early Universe than there are now. Lewis named the collection of globulars the Dulai Structure, which means black stream in Welsh.