Toggle light / dark theme

The space elevator — a structure that reaches into the sky — might feel like a distant, farfetched concept, but it could be closer than we think. In an op-ed for Scientific American.


Wikimedia.

In an op-ed for Scientific American, Physics professor Stephen Cohen at Vanier College in Montreal, Quebec, said he believes the sci-fi-like technology could be a reality within “the next two or three decades.”

Further studies of the meteorite are in peril, though.

A meteorite that fell in Somalia in 2020 is home to at least two minerals that are not found on our planet. The two minerals were identified by researchers at the University of Alberta, a press release said.

Large meteorites are rare but do occur, such as the one that fell near the town of El Ali in Somalia a couple of years ago. The celestial piece of rock weighs a massive 16.


University of Alberta.

Tons of space material enters the Earth’s atmosphere every day and burn up instantly. Very few actually survive the journey through the atmosphere and hit the ground, after which these space rocks are referred to as meteorites.

“Our primary goals for the program are to advance techniques to detect previously unknown objects through search and discovery, to detect small or distant objects and to study spacecraft positioning and navigation in the [beyond GEO] realm,” Oracle’s principal investigator James Frith said in a Nov. 10 statement.

The contract for Oracle, which was previously named the Cislunar Highway Patrol System, comes amid a growing interest in the cislunar environment and increasing concerns about potential deep-space threats from adversaries like China. In response, AFRL and other stakeholders are crafting a classified roadmap that lays out the cislunar capabilities various space agencies are pursuing.

AFRL expects Oracle to launch in 2025 and have a two-year mission life. Along with tracking and detecting new objects, the satellite will inform a separate AFRL effort to develop a green propellant to power space vehicles. The satellite will carry a refueling port for the Advanced Spacecraft Energetic Non-Toxic program.

NASA said Orion is the safest spacecraft in the NASA fleet.

The technological advancements in imaging over the past 20 years are really paying off in space. From Hubble Space Telescope to James Webb, the Perseverance Mars Rover, and now NASA’s Orion spacecraft, a stream of amazing images from space parade before us.


Images are just the beginning

The Orion images capture what it’s like to see Earth from a distance, a great distance. Even the best cameras need to be enhanced for this type of imaging, and Orion is up to that task, and the task of bringing humans back to the Moon.

The absence of the 21-centimeter hydrogen line allowed scientists to determine specific properties of the earliest galaxies in the universe.

An international group of astronomers, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, just shed new light on the cosmic dawn of the universe, a press statement reveals.

The cosmic dawn is a very early period of the universe, during which the first stars and galaxies formed. The researchers used data from India’s SARAS3 radio telescope to analyze this period of the cosmos and determine mass and energy output limits for the first stars and galaxies.

Today, Mars is colloquially known as the ‘Red Planet’ on account of how its dry, dusty landscape is rich in iron oxide (aka. ‘rust’). In addition, the atmosphere is extremely thin and cold, and no water can exist on the surface in any form other than ice.

But as the Martian landscape and other lines of evidence attest, Mars was once a very different place, with a warmer, denser atmosphere and flowing water on its surface.

For years, scientists have attempted to determine how long natural bodies existed on Mars and whether or not they were intermittent or persistent.