Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2015

It’s no TIE fighter, but the Dawn probe is driven by the future of spacecraft propulsion: ion engines.

Continue reading “Dawn of a new era: the revolutionary ion engine that took spacecraft to Ceres” »

(NEXSTAR) — An asteroid about the size of a stadium — or three times the size of the Taj Mahal — is set to speed past Earth on Saturday.

The asteroid, called “2008Go20,” is hurtling towards Earth at 18000 mph, according to NASA. Nevertheless, the agency says there’s no reason to worry.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft is “listening” in on radio emissions from Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, allowing researchers to discover what triggers the strange radio waves.

Of all the planets in our solar system, Jupiter has the largest and most powerful magnetic field, which extends so far that some of the planet’s moons orbit within it. Because Io is closest to the planet, the moon is “caught in a gravitational tug-of-war” between Jupiter and two other large moons, according to NASA. These opposing pulls cause massive internal heat, which has led to hundreds of volcanic eruptions across the moon’s surface.

GPUs up to 12-inches in size are supported.

Intel has revealed its new NUC 11 Extreme, which features its 11th generation CPUs and enough space for a full-size graphics card. It’s a miniature computer that should have enough horsepower to handle modern AAA games.

“The fact that we recorded it confirmed that the core is liquid.”

What you may not realize, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist Mark Panning tells Inverse, is that those diagrams “are cartoons and guesses,” based on gravitational measurements. The only planet whose structure scientists actually understand in detail is Earth.

We know the innards of Earth through seismology measurements — something that hasn’t been available for other planets. This was true until just recently: According to a trio of papers published Thursday in Science, researchers can finally confirm Mars has a large liquid metal core.

Continue reading “NASA finally knows what is beneath the surface of Mars” »

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have today reported the first clear detection of a moon-forming disc around an exoplanet.

China releases videos of its rover Zhurong of the Tianwen-1 mission on Mars.

Join host Abby Bollenbach as she talks about some of the brightest and most distant-known celestial objects: Quasars.