Lifeboat Foundation

Nestled 30 feet underground in Menlo Park, California, a half-mile-long stretch of tunnel is now colder than most of the universe. It houses a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Crews have successfully cooled the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit—or 2 Kelvin—a temperature at which it becomes superconducting and can boost electrons to high energies with nearly zero energy lost in the process. It is one of the last milestones before LCLS-II will produce X-ray pulses that are 10,000 times brighter, on average, than those of LCLS and that arrive up to a million times per second—a world record for today’s most powerful X-ray light sources.

Continue reading “Superconducting X-ray laser reaches operating temperature colder than outer space” »

We’ve never seen a neighboring galaxy like this before.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is sharper than ever in the infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.

As the $10 billion observatory enters the “homestretch” of its commissioning work, according to officials, Webb’s latest image showed off the telescope’s literally stellar performance using its coldest instrument, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

Astronomers have revealed the trails of nearly 1,500 new asteroids hidden in data gathered by NASA’s most venerable space telescope.

In a new study, astronomers and a team of amateur scientists have worked together to comb through archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The project began on International Asteroid Day in 2019, when a team of astronomers launched the “Hubble Asteroid Hunter” project on Zooniverse, a popular platform for crowdsourcing science. The project’s aim was to identify asteroids in old data from Hubble; signals that, in other studies, might have just been filtered out as noise.

To find planets outside the Solar System, Webb’s main imager will stare at starlight. It’s already taken some test images in preparation for primetime.

Time will tell if more effective strategies can be developed to manage space junk in the future. But, as you are about to find out, we may not want to clear up space entirely.

Some of these “dead” spacecraft may still function!

1. Voyager 1 and 2 are still going strong.

Continue reading “Meet some of the oldest ‘undead’ spacecraft that are still going strong” »

On 12 May at 15:00 CEST, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project will hold a press conference to present groundbreaking Milky Way results from the EHT.

The ESO Director General will deliver the opening words. EHT Project Director Huib Jan van Langevelde and EHT Collaboration Board Founding Chair Anton Zensus will also deliver remarks. A panel of EHT researchers will explain the result and answer questions from journalists.

Continue reading “Press Conference at ESO on new Milky Way results from the EHT team, followed by a public Q&A event” »

Well, happily, Ingenuity did call home after about 24 hours. According to NASA, the link was stable, and the solar array managed to charge its batteries to 41 percent. The engineers say they hope to resume Ingenuity’s flight campaign within the next several days after bringing the helicopter’s batteries to a full charge.

Unfortunately, this may be the beginning of the end for a helicopter that has vastly exceeded all expectations. The NASA engineers have had to take some fairly drastic steps to preserve Ingenuity’s battery charge. For example, they have now commanded the helicopter’s heaters to come on only when the battery’s temperature falls to −40°, far colder than the previous point of 5° Fahrenheit. It is not known how many of the off-the-shelf components on the vehicle will fare without this additional heating during the cold Martian nights.

And Mars will only get colder and darker for the next 10 weeks as winter deepens.

Various technologies, networks and institutions benefit from or require accurate time keeping to synchronize their activities. Current ways of synchronizing time have some drawbacks that a new proposed method seeks to address. The cosmic time synchronizer works by synchronizing devices around cosmic ray events detected by those devices. This could bring accurate timing abilities to remote sensing stations, or even underwater, places that other methods cannot serve. Early tests show promise, but the real challenge may lie in the adoption of this new technique.

Humanity is intimately connected with the idea of time. Historically, we used the cosmos itself—stars, the sun, and the moon—to measure time and coordinate our activities. It’s fitting, then, that researchers are looking out to the cosmos again to further develop our ability to keep time. Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka from Muographix at the University of Tokyo devised and tested a way to synchronize multiple devices, so they agree upon the time, that makes use of cosmic rays from deep space. Appropriately, it’s called cosmic time synchronization (CTS).

“It’s relatively easy to keep time accurately these days. For example, atomic clocks have been doing this for decades now,” said Tanaka. “However, these are large and expensive devices that are very easy to disrupt. This is one reason I have been working on an improved way to keep time. The other is that, related to time measurement, position measurement could also be made better. So really, CTS is a precursor to a potential replacement for GPS, but that’s still a little further down the line.”