Lifeboat Foundation

It doesn’t matter how high up they go—it matters what they do when they’re there.

WASHINGTON — NASA postponed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station by two astronauts just hours before it was scheduled to start after getting a warning that debris would pass close to the station.

In a brief statement issued early Nov. 30, NASA said a “debris notification” it received on the evening of Nov. 29 led the agency to postpone the spacewalk by astronauts Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, which had been scheduled to start at about 7:10 a.m. Eastern. The two had planned to replace an S-band antenna on the station’s truss that recently lost the ability to transmit data.

“Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the spacewalk until more information is available,” NASA said in the statement. The agency did not identify the debris in question or the times and distances of closest approach to the station.

On-chip frequency shifters in the gigahertz range could be used in next generation quantum computers and networks.

The ability to precisely control and change properties of a photon, including polarization, position in space, and arrival time, gave rise to a wide range of communication technologies we use today, including the Internet. The next generation of photonic technologies, such as photonic quantum networks and computers, will require even more control over the properties of a photon.

One of the hardest properties to change is a photon’s color, otherwise known as its frequency, because changing the frequency of a photon means changing its energy.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has set a new pair of records after it survived its 10th close encounter with the Sun. On November 21, 2021 at 4:25 am EST (08:25 GMT), the robotic deep-space explorer came within 5.3 million miles (8.5 million km) of the Sun’s surface and reached a speed of 363,660 mph (586,864 km/h), making it both the closest satellite to survive such a near pass of the Sun and the fastest-ever artificial object.

The Parker Solar Probe was launched on August 12, 2018 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket, and this latest solar flyby between November 16 and 26 marks the halfway point in the spacecraft’s seven-year mission to study the Sun at such close quarters that it will eventually fly through the Sun’s corona.

Having easily beaten the record holder, the Helios-2 spacecraft and its maximum speed of 157,078 mph (252,792 km/h), Parker is now in a league of its own. Its latest speed record beats its own previous record, as will be the case for the future record speeds the probe is expected to reach in later flybys.

The holidays still happen in space, they just look a little bit different. But the sentiments are the same.

“I’m going to do whatever I can to show how thankful I am for my crewmates,” said NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei in a NASA video shared from the International Space Station Monday. “It’s wonderful having all of these folks up here. We haven’t been up here together that long, but wow it sure has been wonderful already.”

Continue reading “This is how astronauts celebrate Thanksgiving in space” »

F4F is launching Blue Marble Night as a new spacer holiday, commemorating the Blue Marble photo taken by Apollo 17 on 7 December, 1972.
Want to help?

We are setting up a celebration of the limitless inspiration of space. One that recognizes the fragility of our world while simultaneously infusing a sense of hope and awe. We will have the Overview Effect and our future in space as the main focuses. :
Here is what you can do:

1. Recruit celebrities and regular people to record 30–60 second testimonials about the Overview Effect or their connection to space.

Continue reading “Help us turn December BLUE” »

Nearly the same size as Blackpool Tower and twice as large as Big Ben, astronomers estimate that if the asteroid were to hit the Earth, the impact would produce the equivalent energy to 77 megatons of TNT.

This is 1.5 times as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear weapon ever tested.

Start your Audible trial today: http://www.audible.com/spacetime.

Hello from the other side. In this episode find out how quanta can can move through solid objects.

Continue reading “Is Quantum Tunneling Faster than Light? | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios” »

The AI algorithm is more efficient in distinguishing false positives from the real stuff than human experts.

A new artificial intelligence algorithm has discovered over 300 previously unknown exoplanets in data gathered by a now-defunct exoplanet-hunting telescope.

The Kepler Space Telescope, NASA’s first dedicated exoplanet hunter, has observed hundreds of thousands of stars in the search for potentially habitable worlds outside our solar system. The calatog of potential planets it had compiled continues generating new discoveries even after the telescope’s demise. Human experts analyze the data for signs of exoplanets. But a new algorithm called ExoMiner can now mimic that procedure and scour the catalog faster and more efficiently.