Lifeboat Foundation

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NASA is getting ready to launch a spacecraft to test an experimental method to deflect near-Earth objects, and you can participate in the mission by testing your own planetary defense know-how.

The space agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is designed to test a “kinetic impactor” technique for deflecting any asteroid or comet that might otherwise impact Earth.

NASA’s huge new space observatory must survive a daunting series of deployments if it’s to work.

In the Decadal Survey 2020 report, astronomers set out their wish list for the next decade. It includes giant telescopes and big views of habitable exoplanets.

SRI Newsletter, a report from IAC2021 Dubaiby Prof. Bernard Foing, SRI President, and.

Paramount important too, space philosophy and humanities are now well recognized and accepted by the space community. The first IAF Congress I attended, 1998 at Melbourne, was dramatically void of philosophy, yet participants already were missing it. I saw many young people at IAC2021, scientists, designers, economists, scholars of various disciplines, including philosophy. And, heartwarming indeed, Space Renaissance had a great enthusiastic welcome. The space people know us (and know me!), many people which I didn’t know personally shook my hand, asked me for comments and short talks, were enthusiast about the Space Renaissance… All of that is for sure due to the big work we made for our recent congress, and of course to the great world-wide influence of our new President, Prof. Bernard Foing. Yet, there is something deeper, in the feeling of this peculiar sub-assembly of humankind, that was looking ahead enough to dedicate their life to human expansion into outer space. The last two years – characterized by the Covid pandemics — have worked hard, to shape and forge space leaders, raising the awareness of the urgency to kick-off the civilian space development. And it is now maybe a general acknowledge that the space philosophers were right, when they were rushing for an acceleration of the enabling technologies, low cost access to space, space tourism, space safety, … The need to get rid of space debris was well present in several speeches, even if only a few dare to target space debris as a huge source of business development, when we’ll start capturing and reusing them.

It recommends that NASA coordinate, build and launch three flagship space observatories capable of detecting light over a broad range of wavelengths. It suggests that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) fund two enormous ground-based telescopes in Chile and possibly Hawaii, to try to catch up with an advanced European telescope that’s under construction. And for the first time, it issues recommendations for how federal agencies should fight systemic racism, sexism and ot… See more.

Its ‘decadal survey’ pitches big new space observatories, funding for large telescopes and a reckoning over social issues plaguing the field.

To check out any of the lectures available from Great Courses Plus go to http://ow.ly/dweH302dILJ

We’ll soon be capable of building self-replicating robots. This will not only change humanity’s future but reshape the galaxy as we know it.

Continue reading “Self-Replicating Robots and Galactic Domination | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios” »

Water has been detected in the most massive galaxy in the early Universe, along with its neighbouring companion, according to new observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). In addition to H₂O, astronomers found carbon monoxide (CO) in the galaxy pair, which are designated as SPT0311-58 and located 12.88 billion light years from Earth.

Detection of these two molecules in abundance suggests that the molecular Universe was already going strong, only a relatively short time after the forging of elements in early generations of stars. The new research is the most detailed study of molecular gas content of a galaxy in the early Universe to date and the most distant detection of H20 in a regular star-forming galaxy. The research is published this week in The Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers discovered the two galaxies in 2017. The pair’s location, or time, places them within the Epoch of Reionization. This epoch, as highlighted in the diagram below, occurred when the Universe was only 5% of its current age – and the first stars and galaxies were being born. Scientists believe that the two galaxies may be merging, and that their rapid star formation is not only using up their gas, but may eventually evolve the pair into massive, elliptical galaxies like those seen in the Local Universe.

American astrophysicists have used the Decadal Survey (DS)—also called Astro 2020 and produced by the National Academies of Science—to recommend a space telescope capable of photographing potentially habitable worlds.

The report recommends that a flagship space observatory will need a six-meter mirror to “provide an appropriate balance between scale and feasibility.”

An eight-meter aperture telescope of the scale of LUVOIR-B would be unlikely to launch before the late 2040… See more.

In 1,977 NASA sent out two Voyager probes to study Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecrafts were designed to last about five years, but they are still, to this day, collecting and sending back data from beyond the solar system. But the Voyager mission is living on borrowed time. Today NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce talks about a proposal for an intentionally long mission — what it would take for NASA to actually plan for an interstellar voyage that would pass research and responsibility down through generations.

What would you put on a spacecraft bound for the stars? Email the show at [email protected]!