Astronomers have bounced lasers of mirrors left by Apollo astronauts on the lunar surface for decades. But this is the first time bouncing one off a lunar orbiter — after a decade of trying.
The web app provides you with the precise location of my whereabouts in real-time, using real data. I’m learning space is a big place and I’m delighted to have you see how my team and I navigate it. http://go.nasa.gov/2YmfBz5
This week on #SpaceToGround: a JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) cargo spacecraft leaves the International Space Station.
WASHINGTON — The competition for the moon between the Unites States and China is being closely watched by the Defense Department as the military expects to play a role protecting U.S. access to cislunar space.
One concern for the Pentagon is the possibility that China establishes a presence on the moon before the United States and tries to set the international rules of behavior in space, said Brig. Gen. Steven Butow, director of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit.
DIU is a Defense Department organization based in Silicon Valley that works with commercial vendors developing technologies relevant to national security.
NASA’s Mars rovers have been one of the great scientific and space successes of the past two decades.
Four generations of rovers have traversed the red planet gathering scientific data, sending back evocative photographs, and surviving incredibly harsh conditions—all using on-board computers less powerful than an iPhone 1. The latest rover, Perseverance, was launched on July 30, 2020, and engineers are already dreaming of a future generation of rovers.
While a major achievement, these missions have only scratched the surface (literally and figuratively) of the planet and its geology, geography, and atmosphere.
Another potential explanation is that the heartbeat is illuminated by more diffuse and unstructured outflows of gas and particles generated by the disk’s precession. These outflows are not as concentrated and luminous as the jets, but they could potentially ripple out to Fermi J1913+0515 and light it up in this unique way.
The team is in the midst of collecting follow-up observations with the IRAM 30m millimeter radio telescope in Spain that might constrain the origins of the strange gamma ray heartbeat.
“We discovered the source, and discovered its periodicity, but we do not know what it means or how it is produced, so we need more observations to continue the study,” Li said.
This approach to increasing capacity will be particularly important as robots shrink to the microscale and below—scales at which current stand-alone batteries are too big and inefficient.
“Robot designs are restricted by the need for batteries that often occupy 20% or more of the available space inside a robot, or account for a similar proportion of the robot’s weight,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, who led the research.
Continue reading “Biomorphic batteries could provide 72x more energy for robots” »
A team of Harvard astronomers have a wild new theory: the Sun used to have a companion star, making our solar system a binary one during its ancient history.
The astronomers say the theory could explain the formation of the Oort cloud, a theoretical cloud of dust and smaller objects in the distant regions of our solar system that many believe was created out of the left overs from the early solar system.
In a new preprint submitted last month to the preprint archive arXiv, the team suggests that the Sun used to have a long lost binary star companion. Such a system could explain how some objects were scattered to the far reaches of the solar system, sometimes even making it to neighboring systems and vice versa.
Continue reading “Harvard Astronomers Propose That Our Star System Used to Be Binary” »
If new calculations about the remnants of sunlike stars are correct, everything will end with a series of bangs and then a whimper.
