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Category: space – Page 686

In recent times it seems an image of a human bone sitting somewhere on Mars has been making its rounds yet again. While we’re not sure why this is happening, there is a story behind this ‘bone’ and the image it was present in.

Now, to kick things off, NO it’s not a human bone. This bone-shaped thing is actually a rock, nothing more and nothing less. While in the photograph it does really look like a bone, that’s just not what it is. Actually, NASA even wrote a small piece on this topic breaking down a bit about how this femur thigh bone looking thing on Mars was a rock and why it was/is the shape that we see in that photograph.

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WASHINGTON — The Defense Department has released an updated space strategy that replaces the 2011 document issued by the Obama administration.

The Defense Space Strategy unveiled June 17 provides broad guidance to DoD for “achieving desired conditions in space over the next 10 years,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Steve Kitay said at a Pentagon news conference.

DoD released the 2020 Defense Space Strategy aimed at countering China and Russia.

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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.

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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.

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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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The scan of the Luminary 69 listing available here:
https://archive.org/details/luminary6900miti/mode/2up

The recovered source code is here:

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.

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