Lifeboat Foundation

There a spacecraft so far away in space it has become the first humanmade object to reach interstellar space. It is traveling out there among the stars, far from Earth, far from home. Voyager 1 is set to never return to our star system, let alone Earth. Its mission; to explore the most distant reaches of space.

September 5, 2020, marked 43 since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral. In 2012, the probe became the first object to enter an uncharted, never-before-seen region of space; interstellar space. More precisely, on August 25, 2012, at 122 astronomical units, the probe left the so-called heliopause, and so became the first to reach interstellar space.

Continue reading “15 Things You Should Know About Voyager 1, Mankind’s First Interstellar Spaceship” »

NASA had a big 2021 and finally launched the James Webb Telescope. But its 2022 schedule is nothing to sneeze at.

“Don’t look up” — where Earth is threatened by a “planet killer” asteroid.

This movie hits its target.

Continue reading “Netflix’s best apocalypse movie reveals the truth about planet-killing asteroids” »

We now know of almost 5,000 planets outside the Solar System. If you were to picture what it would be like on one of these distant worlds, or exoplanets, your mental image would probably include a parent star—or more than one, especially if you’re a Star Wars fan.

But scientists have recently discovered that more planets than we thought are floating through space all by themselves—unlit by a friendly stellar companion. These are icy “free-floating planets,” or FFPs. But how did they end up all on their own and what can they tell us about how such planets form?

Finding more and more exoplanets to study has, as we might have expected, widened our understanding of what a planet is. In particular, the line between planets and “brown dwarfs”— cool stars that can’t fuse hydrogen like other stars —has become increasingly blurred. What dictates whether an object is a planet or a brown dwarf has long been the subject of debate—is it a question of mass? Do objects cease to be planets if they are undergoing nuclear fusion? Or is the way in which the object was formed most important?

“This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began,” says astronomer and data visualization expert Catherine Zucker who completed the work during a fellowship at the CfA.

The paper’s central figure, a 3D spacetime animation, reveals that all young stars and star-forming regions — within 500 light years of Earth — sit on the surface of a giant bubble known as the Local Bubble. While astronomers have known of its existence for decades, scientists can now see and understand the Local Bubble’s beginnings and its impact on the gas around it.

India is one of only a handful of nations that have sent probes to the moon and Mars. But the most impressive part of its space program is its cost-effectiveness. Unlike other government space organizations, India’s agency is extremely efficient, with the lowest cost-per-kilogram in the industry. Now India is throwing open its doors to private companies and raising its stellar ambitions.

#India #Space #BloombergQuicktake.
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Continue reading “India Is Doing Space Travel, on a Budget” »

The sun was once surrounded by rings of gas and dust similar to those orbiting Saturn, a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy reveals.

These rings played a vital role in the formation of our solar system and in the size and habitability of Earth.

The early sun’s dust and gas rings may have stopped our planet from becoming a “super-Earth,” according to the Rice University astrophysicists behind the new paper. “In the solar system, something happened to prevent the Earth from growing to become a much larger type of terrestrial planet called a super-Earth,” Rice University astrophysicist André Izidoro, said in a press statement.

Life on Earth is made possible by our planet’s magnetosphere – an invisible radiation shield that protects the surface – now it turns out that super-Earths could have magnetospheres too.

In this edition of Inverse Daily, read stories about how far the James Webb Space Telescope has gone, why Axiom Space is building the station of the future, and more.