Lifeboat Foundation

The launch of NASA’s next Mars rover has been delayed to no earlier than July 22 due to a contamination issue with ground support equipment, the space agency said today (June 24).

NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance was scheduled to launch toward the Red Planet on July 20 from a pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. But a problem cropped up as engineers worked to encapsulate the rover in the nosecone of its Atlas V rocket, which was built by United Launch Alliance.

It started with a blast.

On June 23, construction company Kiewit Alberici Joint Venture set off explosives 3,650 feet beneath the surface in Lead, South Dakota, to begin creating space for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermilab.

The blast is the start of underground excavation activity for the experiment, known as DUNE, and the infrastructure that powers and houses it, called the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, or LBNF.

Astronomers have discovered and validated two small exoplanets orbiting the nearby red dwarf star TOI-1266.

Click on photo to start video.

Have you ever wondered what sunsets on other worlds might look like?

Now you can find out, thanks to simulations created by Goddard scientist Geronimo Villanueva.

Continue reading “NASA Scientist Simulates a Kaleidoscope of Sunsets on Other Worlds” »

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In its 10 years observing the Sun, our Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite has gathered over 425 million high-resolution images of our star.

Continue reading “A Decade of Sun” »

Is the Sun an Oddball Star? A fascinating conversation with Kepler and TESS astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., about how our Sun stacks up against other sunlike stars in the galaxy. We cover the history of our solar system, where the Sun might have been born, and why the only intelligent life we know is around this lonely G-Dwarf star.

The star may be extremely young, but its ring of rock and dust is enormous. The size of just the shadow alone would be hundreds of times the size our entire solar system, according to NASA. Light would take more than a month to travel that distance.

By taking additional pictures using filters, the team was able to create a gorgeous, colored image of the star and its “bat shadow.”

Continue reading “NASA Says Hubble Observed a ‘Flapping Shadow’ in Distant Space” »

Mankind has no choice but to colonise Mars if human beings are to have a future, physicist and science populariser Brian Cox has said. Currently a professor at Manchester University in the UK, Cox has found global fame as a presenter of documentaries, taking millions of viewers on virtual journeys through the galaxy.

INews.co.uk reports:

Continue reading “Professor Brian Cox says humans will soon be living on Mars” »

Before going to space, should we solve the problems here, on Earth?

Whenever we speak about human presence in space to a general audience, and quite often when we talk with specialists as well, we have to hear the Great Objection:” Before going to space, we have to solve our problems here, on the Earth”.

As soon as we reason about it we understand that the Objection is in fact a general dialectic scheme, which consists in changing the topic, pretending that the alternative is more important and urgent and so avoiding to reply to what the speaker has said. In short, it is a sort of quite-another-ism: “The problem is quite another, the cause is quite another…”.