Lifeboat Foundation

For all the fuss it caused, it is only about a foot high.

The “door” was imaged by NASA’s Curiosity rover on May 7 on the slopes of Mount Sharp, the central massif within Gale crater, where it landed in 2012. Described on one website as a “pharaonic tomb door” because of its resemblance to some ancient Egyptian remains, it is, in fact, only about one foot high.

It is hard to spot on the panoramic image mosaic of the hillside above, but it leaps out at the eye if you see the individual frame where it occurs, as seen below. It does look like a doorway until you realize how small it is. And if you boost the contrast in the dark parts of the image, the picture just about reveals a solid rock face at the back of the shadowed interior. So as a gateway into the hollow hills of Mars, it doesn’t lead very far.

Continue reading “‘Door’ on Mars? A planetary scientist explains what you really see” »

“We’re just human, and we cannot predict what the universe is going to tell us.”

It’s the moment we have all been waiting for: The James Webb Space Telescope will make its first scientific observations of the universe in the coming weeks. The first full-color images will drop on July 12, 2022, along with spectroscopic data.

This is the crescendo moment in a scientific symphony that has been tuning up for the last two decades.

Continue reading “A new cosmic dawn: The Webb Telescope’s first color images are arriving soon” »

AI For Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation — Angela Sheffield, Senior Program Manager, National Nuclear Security Administration, U.S. Department of Energy.

Angela Sheffield is a graduate student and Space Industry fellow at the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School. She is on detail from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), where she serves as the Senior Program Manager for AI for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development.

Continue reading “Angela Sheffield — AI For Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation — National Nuclear Security Admin (NNSA)” »

An analysis of lunar craters has found that we’ve been living in a relatively violent period in cosmic history.

Behold, the helicopter’s fastest and longest excursion over the Martian surface.

In April, the helicopter completed its 25th flight on Mars.

Could Life on Earth Have a Martian Origin? — Reevaluating Panspermia. For more info, see:

Revisiting Panspermia: did life come from outside of Earth?

When it is free in cold space, a molecule will spontaneously cool down by slowing its rotation and losing rotational energy in quantum transitions. Physicists have shown that this rotational cooling process can be accelerated, slowed down and even inverted by the molecule’s collisions with surrounding particles.

Researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany and the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory have recently carried out an experiment aimed at measuring the rate of quantum transitions caused by collisions between molecules and electrons. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, offer the first experimental evidence of this rate, which had previously only been theoretically estimated.

“When electrons and molecular ions are present in tenuous, ionized gases, the lowest quantum level populations of the molecules can be changed in a collision process,” Ábel Kálosi, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “One example of this process is in interstellar clouds, where observations reveal molecules predominantly in their lowest quantum states. The attractive force between the negatively charged electrons and the positively charged molecular ions makes the process of electronic collisions particularly efficient.”

The Global Exploration Strategy is a blueprint for understanding space policy today.

15 years ago, the Global Exploration Strategy set out the space policy agenda on course to put humans back on the Moon as soon as possible.