Lifeboat Foundation

Space can be a horror show of cosmic violence, and now astronomers have captured the first photographic evidence of the carnage that can be unleashed when two heavyweight galaxies collide.

A collaboration between an international team of researchers has produced the first ever image of a relativistic jet of gas and plasma spewing forth from a pair of galaxies as they dive head-first into one another.

While galaxies have been caught mid-collision plenty of times before, this is the first time a jet of this kind has been seen spilling out of such a merger, and it could tell us a thing or two about how they arise.

Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first measurement of wind speed on a brown dwarf—an object intermediate in mass between a planet and a star.

Based on facts known about the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System, a team of scientists led by Katelyn Allers of Bucknell University realized that they possibly could measure a brown dwarf’s wind speed by combining radio observations from the VLA and infrared observations from Spitzer.

“When we realized this, we were surprised that no one else had already done it,” Allers said.

Technicians attached the first-of-its-kind Mars Helicopter to Perseverance’s belly on Monday (April 6) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the rover is being prepped for its planned July 17 launch.

Russia seems to see the writing on the wall. No longer can disposable rockets win business for the Russian Space Industry. NASA put an end to the ongoing launches of astronauts into space with the development of domestic. The Russian space industry plans on maintaining or growing market share.

“In 2020, 33 launches are planned, of which 12 launches of satellites under the Federal Space Program, nine launches of commercial vehicles, three from the Guiana Space Center,”

Dmitry Rogozin the head of Roscosmos.

According to https://tass.ru/, Russia is planning on completing 30 commercial launches in 2020. To compete in the international market, Roscosmos announced the cost of launch services will be reduced by more than 30%. The allegation is that American companies are price dumping. With the emergence of SpaceX into the launch sector and other new space companies, the launch vehicle options increased greatly. SpaceX specifically has captured a lot of commercial launch contracts with the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX has proven the booster reuse capability up to five times and disclosed that the reusability is much greater.

Dmitry Rogozin’s claim of American companies engaging in price dumping may not be a valid comparison. American companies diversified the supply. New innovative rockets have been designed, built and launched by American companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab.

O,.o circa 2017.

Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey used the most luminous objects in the universe — quasars — to create their new 3D map of space.

In the early hours of this morning, the BepiColombo spacecraft swung past Earth on its way to the inner Solar System – and in the process captured some rather glorious views of our planet.

The joint European-Japanese mission, which comprises two orbiters carried by Europe’s Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), is on a seven-year mission to enter orbit around Mercury in December 2025, having launched form Earth in October 2018.

In order to reach Mercury, the spacecraft must lose energy as it falls towards the Sun so it can be captured into orbit by the planet. To do so, it is using gravitational tugs of Earth, Venus, and Mercury itself to slow its speed as it flies past.

From the US territory Guam, sightings came in of a fireball falling from the sky. The strategic location of Guam and the U.S. military stationed there has drawn attention for years. Guam thrust into the limelight during heightened tensions with North Korea. In August 2017, North Korea launched missiles that flew over Japan and into the northern Pacific Ocean in an apparent attempt to threaten the US territory of Guam. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did not follow up on his threats, but a fireball came crashing down from a different source.

Local officials quickly released an announcement indicating the Chinese Long March Launch as a likely source of the fireball. Indeed, an Indonesia satellite launched on a Chinese rocket came crashing back to Earth. The satellite failed to reach orbit. The failure of the new communications satellite for Indonesia to reach orbit marked the second failure for china’s space agency in less than a month, state media reported April 9.

It is unlike the Chinese Long March 3, workhorse of the Chinese launch industry, series rocket to fall. According to the Xinhua News Agency, the rocket lifted off at 7:46 p.m local time from China’s Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the Sichuan province. The rocket traveled according to plan during the first and second stages. The Rocket third stage experienced abnormal conditions.

Continue reading “Chinese Launched Satellite Seen Crashing Back to Earth Over Guam, USA” »

On Friday, an interplanetary spacecraft will slingshot around Earth in the super early morning hours. The spacecraft, a joint European and Japanese creation, will use our planet’s gravity to brake its speed and change its course through the Solar System, putting itself on track to reach Mercury in the next five years.

The probe whipping by our planet is called BepiColombo, which is actually two spacecraft wrapped into one package. One spacecraft, designed and operated by the European Space Agency, is equipped with 11 instruments to study Mercury from the planet’s orbit. The second comes from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and it’s designed to study Mercury while spinning in orbit. Once they reach Mercury, the two spacecraft will break apart and revolve around the planet on their own, studying the world’s exterior and its inner core.

Before all that can happen, BepiColombo needs to make it to Mercury. Launched in October 2018, BepiColombo’s route to the planet is set to last a total of seven years, and a lot of that time is spent slowing down. Because Mercury is so close to the Sun, spacecraft that travel toward the planet are constantly being tugged by our Solar System’s star, causing them to speed up. BepiColombo has to repeatedly put on the brakes to make sure it doesn’t go barreling into the Sun.

The Milky Way in the sky of Ali Prefecture, southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Sept.27, 2018. (Xinhua/Purbu Zhaxi)

The star, named LAMOST J040643.69+542347.8, has an estimated rotational velocity of 540 km per second, which is about 100 km per second faster than that of the previous record holder, HD 191423.

BEIJING, April 9 (Xinhua) — A Chinese astronomer has discovered the fastest rotating star in the Milky Way galaxy based on data from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) located in Xinglong, in northern China’s Hebei Province.