Lifeboat Foundation

Have you seen C/2021 A1 (Leonard) —a.k.a. “Comet Leonard”—yet? Discovered on January 3, 2021 by Greg Leonard, a senior research specialist at Arizona’s Mount Lemmon Observatory, Comet Leonard is potentially going to become an object visible to binocular and even naked eyes. It’s predicted to reach around magnitude 4 or brighter in December 2021 (for the latest, follow it on Twitter).

It will get closest to the Earth to be super-bright on December 12, 2021, but by then it’s going to be fairly low in the sky. So your best chance is to get up early—about 90 minutes before sunrise—during early December and look east.

Arm yourself with either a small telescope or any pair of binoculars to maximize your chances.

NASA’s box-shaped space probe will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday, November 23 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Less than a year later it will hit its target.

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected a new sub-Neptune exoplanet orbiting an M dwarf star. The newly found extrasolar world, designated TOI-2406 b, is nearly three times larger than the Earth. The discovery is reported in a paper published July 29 on arXiv.org.

TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of finding transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified over 4,400 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 144 have been confirmed so far.

Recently, a team of astronomers led by Robert Wells of the University of Bern in Switzerland confirmed a new TESS planet around the star known as TOI-2406 (or TIC 212957629). TESS observed TOI-2406 in 2018 and 2020, which resulted in the detection of a transit signal in the light curve of this object. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by follow-up photometric and spectroscopic observations using various ground-based telescopes.

NASA will launch a mission to crash into an asteroid (on purpose) overnight tonight and you can watch it lift off live online.

The agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will travel millions of miles out into the solar stem to smash into an asteroid, altering its orbit around a larger space rock to practice in the event of a rogue Earth-bound asteroid. The mission is set to lift off from Space Launch Complex-4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California early Wednesday, Nov. 24, at 1:20 a.m. EST (10:20 p.m. PST on Nov. 23/0620 GMT).

O,.o! Circa 2018

We can produce very little antimatter and what we make is very difficult to store. These have been huge obstacles that have made antimatter propulsion many trillions of times beyond technological capabilities.

Positron Dynamics and Ryan Weed get around these issues by using isotopes of Krypton or sodium which naturally produce positrons (anti-electrons). They can use tiny amounts of Krypton isotopes to generation 100 billion to many trillions of positrons. They can also breed more of Krypton 79 isotopes by exposing Krypton 78 to neutrons.

Continue reading “Positron Antimatter catalyzed fusion propulsion” »

Our galaxy is not alone. Swirling around the Milky Way are several smaller, dwarf galaxies—the biggest of which are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere.

During their dance around the Milky Way over billions of years, the Magellanic Clouds’ gravity has ripped from each of them an enormous arc of gas—the Magellanic Stream. The stream helps tell the history of how the Milky Way and its closest galaxies came to be and what their future looks like.

New astronomical models developed by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Space Telescope Science Institute recreate the birth of the Magellanic Stream over the last 3.5 billion years. Using the latest data on the structure of the gas, the researchers discovered that the stream may be five times closer to Earth than previously thought.

New observations reveal the possible origins of a mysterious object called Kamoʻoalewa. It could be the wreckage from an ancient impact on the moon.

Nearly 20 years after the Concorde made its final commercial flight, new efforts are underway to make supersonic passenger travel viable again. Bill Whitaker reports.

“60 Minutes” is the most successful television broadcast in history. Offering hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, feature segments and profiles of people in the news, the broadcast began in 1968 and is still a hit, over 50 seasons later, regularly making Nielsen’s Top 10.

Continue reading “Startups, NASA pursuing supersonic commercial flight” »

The Moon awaits. After long decades in which no human being set foot on the lunar surface, we are heading back. And quite soon.