Lifeboat Foundation

In a country where women are seen first and foremost as wives and mothers, Kyrgyzstan’s all-female space agency defies expectations. Aged between 18 and 24, the eight-woman team are building a one-kilo satellite that will be the country’s first foray into the cosmos as an independent state. Based in Bishkek, they told The Calvert Journal what this project means for them— and thousands of girls like them.

Space Engine is a free-to-download, procedurally generated simulator that’s ten years in the making. Despite the incomprehensible size of the game’s universe, it was developed by one man. But now, he says, he can’t do it alone.

A newly discovered comet has excited the astronomical community this week because it appears to have originated from outside the solar system. The object—designated C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) — was discovered on Aug. 30, 2019, by Gennady Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnij, Crimea. The official confirmation that comet C/2019 Q4 is an interstellar comet has not yet been made, but if it is interstellar, it would be only the second such object detected. The first, Oumuamua, was observed and confirmed in October 2017.

The new comet, C/2019 Q4, is still inbound toward the Sun, but it will remain farther than the orbit of Mars and will approach no closer to Earth than about 190 million miles (300 million kilometers).

After the initial detections of the comet, Scout system, which is located at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, automatically flagged the object as possibly being interstellar. Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL worked with astronomers and the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center in Frascati, Italy, to obtain additional observations. He then worked with the NASA-sponsored Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to estimate the comet’s precise trajectory and determine whether it originated within our solar system or came from elsewhere in the galaxy.

Proposed “Spaceline” space elevator to the moon could be feasible, and could simplify efforts to mine raw materials from the lunar surface.

Since July, Toyota has been working on a brand-new design. It features special, much higher efficiency solar panels that are mounted on the hood, roof and even hatchback of the car, charging the car’s batteries even when it’s moving.

Panel Van

The new solar system could allow the Prius to cover 50 kilometers, four days a week, on solar alone, Bloomberg reports.

In the 50 years since the moon landing, humanity has made tremendous leaps in technology. But how close are we to turning our sci-fi aspirations—from space colonies to asteroid mining—into reality? (Partner content)

Advances in astronomical observation over the past century have allowed scientists to construct a remarkably successful model of how the cosmos works. It makes sense – the better we can measure something, the more we learn.

But when it comes to the question of how fast our Universe is expanding, some new cosmological measurements are making us ever more confused.

Since the 1920s we’ve known that the Universe is expanding – the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us. In fact, in the 1990s, the rate of expansion was found to be accelerating.

Einstein’s framework for the universe, space-time, is at odds with quantum theory. Overcoming this clash and others is vital to unravelling the true nature of the cosmos.

The world’s biggest astrophotography competition includes some jaw-dropping images of the Moon, Sun, distant galaxies and much more.