Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 629

Episode 50 — Bioengineering Our Human Species To Reach The Stars

Great new episode with renowned geneticist Christopher Mason who talks about his book on how we will need to bioengineer our own species in order to expand beyond our solar system.

Geneticist Christopher Mason chats about his new book, “The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds” from MIT Press. We discuss both the nuts and bolts and the philosophy driving our expansion offworld. Mason’s goal is to preserve our species by expanding to an Earth 2.0 in order to avoid our star’s own Red Giant endgame.

China’s Yutu 2 rover about to ‘wake up’ on the far side of the moon

China’s plucky Yutu 2 rover is about to wake up and continue to explore the far side of the moon as the nation works to land a rover on Mars this May.

The rover, which launched with the Chang’e 4 mission, landed on the far side of the moon in January 2019 and recently completed its 29th lunar day of activities, the China Lunar Exploration Project (CLEP) said on April 23.

Hear the Eerie Sounds of Interstellar Space Captured by NASA’s Voyager

In the sparse collection of atoms that fills interstellar space, Voyager 1 has measured a long-lasting series of waves where it previously only detected sporadic bursts.

Until recently, every spacecraft in history had made all of its measurements inside our heliosphere, the magnetic bubble inflated by our Sun. But on August 25, 2012, NASA ’s Voyager 1 changed that. As it crossed the heliosphere’s boundary, it became the first human-made object to enter – and measure – interstellar space. Now eight years into its interstellar journey, a close listen of Voyager 1’s data is yielding new insights into what that frontier is like.

If our heliosphere is a ship sailing interstellar waters, Voyager 1 is a life raft just dropped from the deck, determined to survey the currents. For now, any rough waters it feels are mostly from our heliosphere’s wake. But farther out, it will sense the stirrings from sources deeper in the cosmos. Eventually, our heliosphere’s presence will fade from its measurements completely.

Physicists have measured an atom’s ‘neutron skin’ for the first time

Physicists have measured the “skin” of an atom for the first time and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is extremely thin. The measurement may help us understand the properties of neutron stars.

Lead-208, an isotope that contains 82 protons and 126 neutrons, has a type of nucleus that physicists refer to as “doubly magic” because both the protons and the neutrons are arranged neatly into shells inside the nucleus. These shells keep the atom relatively stable and make it simpler to experiment on, so when the PREX collaboration at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia set out to measure neutron skin, they opted to experiment on lead-208.

In 1.3 Million Years, a Star Will Come Within 24 Light-Days of the Sun

Within the Milky Way, there are an estimated 200 to 400 billion stars, all of which orbit around the center of our galaxy in a coordinated cosmic dance. As they orbit, stars in the galactic disk (where our Sun is located) periodically shuffle about and get closer to one another. At times, this can have a drastic effect on the star that experience a close encounter, disrupting their systems and causing planets to be ejected.

Knowing when stars will make a close encounter with our Solar System, and how it might shake-up objects within it, is therefore a concern to astronomers. Using data collected by the Gaia Observatory, two researchers with the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) determined that a handful of stars will be making close passes by our Solar System in the future, one of which will stray pretty close!

The study was conducted by Vadim V. Bobylev and Anisa T. Bajkova, two researchers from the Pulkovo Observatory’s Laboratory of Galaxy Dynamics in St. Petersburg, Russia. As they indicated, they relied on astrometric data from the Gaia mission’s Early Data Release 3 (EDR3), which revealed kinematic characteristics of stars that are expected to pass within 3.26 light-years (1 Parsec) with the Solar System in the future.

Perseverance’s Robotic Arm Starts Conducting Science Program

NASA’s newest Mars rover is beginning to study the floor of an ancient crater that once held a lake.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been busy serving as a communications base station for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and documenting the rotorcraft’s historic flights. But the rover has also been busy focusing its science instruments on rocks that lay on the floor of Jezero Crater.

What insights they turn up will help scientists create a timeline of when an ancient lake formed there, when it dried, and when sediment began piling up in the delta that formed in the crater long ago. Understanding this timeline should help date rock samples – to be collected later in the mission – that might preserve a record of ancient microbes.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has begun its 1.4 billion mile journey back to Earth — and it’s carrying historic asteroid samples

After nearly five years in space, a NASA spacecraft is nearing the end of its historic mission, beginning its journey home to Earth with a plethora of asteroid samples.

NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft began its journey back to Earth on Monday — a trip that’s expected to take around two-and-a-half years. It’s returning from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and it marks NASA’s first-ever asteroid sample return mission.

The spacecraft is only about 200 million miles away, but it will have to circle the sun twice to catch up to Earth — making the journey a total of 1.4 billion miles.

Astronomers detect substellar companion of HD 47127

Using the Harlan J. Smith Telescope, astronomers have discovered that the star HD 47127 has a substellar companion. The newly identified object, designated HD 47127 B, appears to be a brown dwarf or a brown dwarf binary. The finding is reported in a paper published May 4 on arXiv.org.

Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and . Astronomers generally agree that they are substellar objects occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses. One subclass of brown dwarfs (with effective temperatures between 500 and 1500K) is known as T dwarfs, and represents the coolest and least luminous substellar objects so far detected.

Located some 86.8 away, HD 47127 is an old sun-like main sequence star of spectral type G5. The star is slightly metal-rich and has a mass of about 1.02 solar masses. Its age is estimated to be between 7 and 10 billion years.