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Category: space – Page 530

At Europe’s Spaceport near Kourou in French Guiana, technicians are busy getting the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) ready for launch. The observatory arrived at the facility on Oct. 12th and was placed inside the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it to space on Nov. 11th. The upper stage was then hoisted high above the core stage and boosters so that a team of engineers could integrate them.

Unfortunately, an “incident” occurred shortly after when the engineers attempted to attach the upper stage to the launch vehicle adapter (LVA) to the launch vehicle. According to a NASA Blogs post, the incident involved the sudden release of a clamp band (which secures the JWST to the LVA), which sent vibrations throughout the observatory. According to NASA, this incident could push the JWST’s launch date (slated for Dec. 18th) to Dec. 22nd.

A NASA-led anomaly review board was immediately convened to investigate the unexpected development and recommend how to proceed. The board recommended that additional testing be instituted to “determine with certainty” that the incident did not damage any components. NASA also indicated that it and its mission partners would provide an update when the testing is completed, which is expected to be by the end of this week.

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Are viruses alive or are they lifeless packages of protein and nucleic acid?
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/-LUQTjdHYNo.
Carl’s book “Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive” is available now — https://geni.us/zimmer.

Countless scientists around the world study life, and yet they can’t really agree on what it is. Join New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer as he explores the boundaries of life, encountering viruses and other strange residents of the borderlands.

Carl Zimmer is the author of fourteen books about science. Zimmer’s column “Matter” appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution. His book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award. The Guardian named it the best science book of 2018.

Zimmer is a familiar voice on radio programs such as Radiolab and professor adjunct at Yale University. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom both a species of tapeworm and an asteroid have been named.

This talk was recorded on 26 August 2021.

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Imagine, if you will, that future humans manage to travel to other worlds and find… more humans.

According to one University of Cambridge astrobiologist, that scenario may be more likely than you’d think.

In a new interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the institution’s Department of Earth Sciences named Simon Conway Morris declared that researchers can “say with reasonable confidence” that human-like evolution has occurred in other locations around the universe.

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Physicists have detected “ghost particles” in the Large Hadron Collider for the first time. An experiment called FASER picked up telltale signals of neutrinos being produced in particle collisions, which can help scientists better understand key physics.

Neutrinos are elementary particles that are electrically neutral, extremely light and rarely interact with particles of matter. That makes them tricky to detect, even though they’re very common – in fact, there are billions of neutrinos streaming through your body right now. Because of this, they’re often described as ghost particles.

Neutrinos are produced in stars, supernovae, quasars. radioactive decay and from cosmic rays interacting with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s long been thought that particle accelerators like the LHC should be making them too, but without the right instruments they would just zip away undetected.

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Roscosmos launched a new docking node module to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, November 24 at 13:06 UTC / 8:06 am EST.

Launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the module will add additional docking ports to the Russian Segment of the station to provide options for future expansion but is the final Russian model planned for the outpost.

Background

The original design for the Russian Segment of the ISS called for a Universal Docking Module (UDM) to expand the Russian Segment’s available docking ports for the addition of future modules. This module was canceled early in the ISS program due to budget issues.

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