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Category: space – Page 473

This cosmic cloud of gas and dust is about 5,000 light-years away.

“I had vowed never to sell that guitar,” Gill tells Inverse. “But I spent some more time [on astrophotography] in the last few years so I think I’ve gotten a bit more into it, and spent some more money on it.”

Gill’s latest image features a cosmic landscape of newborn stars, gas, and dust.

The Rosette Nebula shines in this deep-space image captured by Gill from his backyard in Santa Clarita, Los Angeles. Its fusion of gases illuminates the center of the image, while the nebula’s stellar inhabitants spread across the dark skies. For Gill to capture such detail from the smoggy, bright skies of Los Angeles is not easy, and requires a lot of patience, practice, and hours of exposure.

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Space Race 2.0 is heating up.

There’s no use denying it: Space Race 2.0 is heating up.

But while the focus remains on public-private partnerships in low-Earth orbit, space junk, and finally human settlements on the moon and Mars, a remnant of that original space race spirit is beginning to awaken: the push to explore the outer edges of our solar system, and beyond.

Last year, China announced it was developing a pair of spacecraft capable of exploring the very edge of our solar system. According to an official industry newspaper called *China Space News Friday*, the mission “Interstellar Express” promised the potential to enter interstellar space by the middle of the century.

Of course, NASA already did it.

‘NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977, in addition to Voyager 2 a month earlier — two intrepid spacecraft that toured the outer solar system through the late eighties. Both spacecraft are now in interstellar space and still sending what data they can back, with most equipment shut down to preserve power. But NASA might not be done with deep space missions yet.

Continue reading “China and NASA are developing next-gen Voyager-like spacecraft. But whose is better?” | >

Glass isn’t uncommon on the Moon. But these spheres are.

China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover on a mission to find out more about the far side of the Moon has made a startling new discovery. It has found mysterious glass spheres that may have captured within them important information about the Moon’s composition and history of its impact events, * Science Alert* reported.

Originally scheduled to be operational on the lunar surface for just three months, the Yutu-2 now holds the record of being the longest operational rover on the Moon. When it landed in 2019, it became the first rover to reach the far side of the Moon and has since been providing us insights about the side we cannot see from Earth. Last month, we learned that the soil on the far side is a lot stickier, and now there is the mystery of the glass spheres on the Moon aren’t a new finding. But the nature of these spheres makes them interesting and possibly a gateway for future missions.

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“We saw a very large coronal mass ejection, which is a major storm on the sun,” Todd explained. “It happened on the far side, which is awfully good because it was enormous.”

Though the explosive CME is not expected to strike Earth, images captured by satellite and seismic mapping showing the sheer size of the eruption had many people talking, Todd said.

Todd said scientists estimate the flare stretched to roughly 400,000 kilometers, greater than the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

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Tae Seok Moon, associate professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has taken a big step forward in his quest to design a modular, genetically engineered kill switch that integrates into any genetically engineered microbe, causing it to self-destruct under certain defined conditions.

His research was published Feb. 3 in the journal Nature Communications.

Moon’s lab understands microbes in a way that only engineers would, as systems made up of sensors, circuits and actuators. These are the components that allow microbes to sense the world around them, interpret it and then act on the interpretation.

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