Lifeboat Foundation

In the yawning vacuum of intergalactic space, something large is lurking.

Not a galaxy, although it’s of a comparable size: A vast cloud of hot, faintly glowing gas, bigger than the Milky Way, in the space between galaxies congregating in a huge cluster.

Scientists believe this cloud may have been unceremoniously stripped from a galaxy in the cluster, the first gas cloud of this kind we’ve ever seen. Even more surprisingly, it hasn’t dissipated, but has remained clumped together for hundreds of millions of years.

Concept I introduced long ago in TMP2 as the Inchworm orbital service robot is now being demonstrated by the ESA with the new Russian addition to the ISS.

It is much like a human arm. It has an elbow, shoulders and even wrists. The European Robotic Arm (ERA) is the first robot able to ‘walk’ around the Russian segment of the International Space Station.

Light yet powerful, the orbital arm has the ability to anchor itself to the Station and move back and forward by itself, hand-over-hand between fixed base-points. This space robot looks like a pair of compasses and has a length of over 11 m. When stretched, it could pass a football from a penalty spot to the goalkeeper.

Continue reading “European Robotic Arm” »

Watch as the blast wave from an exploded star moves at nearly 9 million miles per hour. Astronomers captured this movement by combining data spanning 14 years from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This hand-shaped structure is a nebula of energy and particles blown by a pulsar left behind aft.

Wide, diagonal avenues radiate from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., outward through the city.

The original layout and design of Washington, D.C., comes to life in this springtime photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. The near-nadir, high resolution photo offers a view of the city’s layout that its architects, Peter L‘Enfant and Andrew Ellicott, could only imagine when they drew up plans for the District of Columbia in the 1790s. Nestled at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, today the city serves as both the seat of the U.S. government and as a tribute to the history of the nation.

From above, the city layout draws the eye to the Capitol. This was the architects’ starting point, and the rest of the city was built in quadrants defined by axes extending in cardinal directions from this “center” of American government. These axes orient the rest of the D.C. street grid, with one notable exception. Wide, diagonal avenues radiate from the Capitol outward through the city, meeting with other diagonals to form parks and public spaces. These diagonals, named after the first states, are the main thoroughfares. The most famous of these avenues is a direct line between two branches of government—Pennsylvania Avenue physically links the White House with the Capitol.

Astronomy is all about data. The universe is getting bigger and so too is the amount of information we have about it. But some of the biggest challenges of the next generation of astronomy lie in just how we’re going to study all the data we’re collecting.

To take on these challenges, astronomers are turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to build new tools to rapidly search for the next big breakthroughs. Here are four ways AI is helping astronomers.

On June 25, 2021 NASA published detail description of future missions for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter considering 2nd software update because of HD imaging issue. Ingenuity’s team determined that capturing color images may have been inducing the imaging pipeline glitch, which resulted in the instability (Flight 6 anomaly). So Mars Helicopter needs 2nd software update to make thing going well within upcoming 9th flight. Ingenuity’s first bug was solved by software update (watchdog timer issue). Another software update for Mars Helicopter is intended to return ability to make 13 Megapixels photos on mars without flight anomalies for Ingenuity. Last week Mars Helicopter completed 8th flight on flying to 160 meters South and Perseverance goes to new location Séítah as well. Black and white images are from Ingenuity’s onboard camera directly. Mars Helicopter flew for 77.4 seconds. Maximal horizontal speed was 4 meters per second. Altitude was 10 meters. Ingenuity made amazing work to live on Mars autonomously.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Continue reading “Helicopter Ingenuity in trouble on Mars losing ability to take Hi-Res color photos” »

Our generation will certainly not be around by then, and it’s unclear what will happen to humanity as a species, but in about 4.5 billion years, our galaxy will not be anything like we know it, thanks to a mammoth galactic event that will see the Milky Way merging with nearby Andromeda.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been feuding publicly for years, but the Tesla chief recently came out in praise of the Amazon boss.

Dipole shield could shield #Mars

The Martian atmosphere is a decimated shred of what it once was, thanks to the fact that a disappearing magnetic field allowed solar winds to pummel the red planet’s skies over millions of years. So naturally, one solution to making Mars more habitable may be to resurrect its magnetosphere — and it’s a crazy idea NASA scientists are actually looking into.

At Wednesday’s Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., NASA’s Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green spoke about how this magnetic shield would work.

Continue reading “NASA Might Use Magnetic Shield to Grow Life-Sustaining Atmosphere on Mars” »