Lifeboat Foundation

Turns out the Red Planet is a little more green than we thought. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has detected a tinge of green in the atmosphere, making it the first time this aurora-like glow has been spotted around a planet other than Earth.

Here at home, green glows in the sky are caused by glowing oxygen, excited by collisions with electrons that stream into the atmosphere from solar wind. While aurora are the most dramatic examples, the sky glows almost constantly. At night it can appear green as molecules previously ripped apart by solar winds begin to recombine.

It was predicted that this same effect should be visible around other planets, but it’s hard to spot since the bright surfaces of planets can wash out the color. Now, astronomers from ESA have managed to detect it around Mars for the first time.

You’ve seen his art.

A conversation with space artist Don Davis about his life and work.

Continue reading “Artist Depiction” »

Scientists working on-board the International Space Station have created what they describe as the fifth state of matter, a state referred to as the ‘Bose-Einstein condensate’, initially theorized by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose in the 1920s.

On September 10, 2008, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) fired up for the very first time. In the decade since, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator has been responsible for some of the most important breakthroughs in scientific history, most notably the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2013. New Atlas is celebrating the 10-year anniversary with a look back at the LHC’s achievements and, with a massive new upgrade in the works, what physics puzzles it could help piece together in the future.

Not only is the Large Hadron Collider the world’s largest particle accelerator, it’s the world’s largest machine, full-stop. That’s thanks to a 27-km-long (16.7-mi) ring of pipes that house the particle beams, along with thousands of powerful magnets and an advanced cooling system of liquid helium.

The ring is made up of two separate tubes, with high-energy particle beams circling in opposite directions. Superconducting electromagnets accelerate the particles almost to the speed of light, and for those to work they need to be kept extremely cold: −271.3° C (−456.3° F) to be exact, which is colder than outer space. That’s where the liquid helium comes in, chosen because it’s the only known element to remain in a liquid form at such low temperatures.

Mike Stewart was able to recover the previously lost Apollo 10 LM software, as flown (also known as Luminary 69 Rev 2). He shows us how he did it, which, fair warning, is a pretty technical hack. And contrary to (yet another) internet myth, the flown software would have been perfectly capable of landing Apollo 10 on the Moon.

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Continue reading “Recovering the Lost Apollo 10 LM Software” »

In July 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made history when it became the first robotic explorer to conduct a flyby of Pluto. This was followed by another first, when the NASA mission conducted the first flyby of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) on 31 December 2018 – which has since been named Arrokoth.

Now, on the edge of the Solar System, New Horizons is still yielding some groundbreaking views of the cosmos.

For example, we here on Earth are used to thinking that the positions of the stars are “fixed”. In a sense, they are, since their positions and motions are relatively uniform when seen from our perspective.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has just announced that its ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has identified a long-suspected “green glow” around Mars. The green glow is due to the interaction of sunlight with atoms and molecules in Mars’ atmosphere. To date, we’ve only observed the phenomenon around one other planet: Earth. Now, the scientists who’ve discovered the Red Planet’s green glow say it could help us better understand the planet’s atmosphere. And how to land safely on its surface.

Futurism reported on the finding, which was outlined in a paper recently published in the journal, Nature. According to the paper, this discovery marks the first time scientists have observed the “day glow” and “night glow” that generate the “green line” around Earth around Mars. Or any other planet. The discovery also stands as long sought-after confirmatory evidence of predictions regarding the Martian atmosphere, which date back 40 years.

A NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars has captured fascinating color images of the remains of two defunct spacecraft in their final resting places on the surface of the Red Planet.

Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter spotted an emerald glow in Mars’ wispy atmosphere, marking the first time the phenomenon has been spotted on a world beyond Earth.