Lifeboat Foundation

Members of the public are helping professional astronomers identify nascent planetary systems.

Equally important is the emphasis that RVS puts on its own off-the-shelf thermal vacuum systems. Put another way, that means thermal testing at a palatable price-point while also ensuring that ease-of-use is paramount. “In responding to our call for proposals, RVS was competitive on price and delivered versus desired functionality,” notes Manny Montoya, CAAO technical manager, who heads up a diverse team of engineers, technicians and machinists supporting the research of Douglas and other astronomers at Steward Observatory.

Following the successful launch of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft on Oct. 16, 2021, a group of engineers huddled around a long conference table in Titusville, Florida. Lucy was mere hours into its 12-year flight, but an unexpected challenge had surfaced for the first-ever Trojan asteroids mission.

Data indicated that one of Lucy’s solar arrays powering the spacecraft’s systems—designed to unfurl like a hand fan—hadn’t fully opened and latched, and the team was figuring out what to do next.

Continue reading “Team troubleshoots asteroid-bound Lucy spacecraft across millions of miles” »

Astronomers just discovered the sneaky asteroid on July 26.

NASA astronomers discovered that a large asteroid will zoom past Earth on Aug. 4, missing our planet by millions of miles.

Unlike the moon’s surface, which heats up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and drops to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius) at night, these lunar pits in the Mare Tranquillitatis region have a human-friendly, stable temperature.

(Mare Tranquillitatis, commonly known as the Sea of Tranquility, is where Apollo 11, the first mission to put humans on the moon, landed due to its smooth and relatively flat terrain.)

The data comes from an analysis of images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft and computer modeling.

While driven by the desire to pursue curiosity, fundamental investigations are the crucial first step to innovation.

When scientists announced their discovery of gravitational waves in 2016, it made headlines all over the world. The existence of these invisible ripples in space-time had finally been confirmed.

It was a momentous feat in basic research, the curiosity-driven search for fundamental knowledge about the universe and the elements within it. Basic (or “blue-sky”) research is distinct from applied research, which is targeted toward developing or advancing technologies to solve a specific problem or to create a new product.

Continue reading “How blue-sky research shapes the future” »

A special bonding state between atoms has been created in the laboratory for the first time: With a laser beam, atoms can be polarized so that they are positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other. This makes them attract each other creating a very special bonding state—much weaker than the bond between two atoms in an ordinary molecule, but still measurable. The attraction comes from the polarized atoms themselves, but it is the laser beam that gives them the ability to do so—in a sense, it is a “molecule” of light and matter.

Theoretically, this effect has been predicted for a long time, but now scientists at the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ) at TU Wien, in cooperation with the University of Innsbruck, have succeeded in measuring this exotic atomic bond for the first time. This interaction is useful for manipulating extremely cold atoms, and the effect could also play a role in the formation of molecules in space. The results have now been published in the scientific journal Physical Review X.