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Category: space – Page 738

Time, as far as we know, moves only in one direction. But last year, researchers found events in some gamma-ray burst pulses that seemed to repeat themselves as though they were going backwards in time.

Now, new research suggests a potential answer for what might be causing this time reversibility effect. If waves within the relativistic jets that produce gamma-ray bursts travel faster than light — at ‘superluminal’ speeds — one of the effects could be time reversibility.

Such speeding waves could actually be possible. We know that when light is travelling through a medium (such as gas or plasma), its phase velocity is slightly slower than c — the speed of light in a vacuum, and, as far as we know, the ultimate speed limit of the Universe.

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A robotic Japanese cargo ship successfully arrived at the International Space Station Saturday (Sept. 28) carrying more than 4 tons of supplies, including new batteries for the outpost’s solar power grid.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) HTV-8 cargo ship pulled up to the space station at 7:12 a.m. EDT (1112 GMT), where it was captured by a robotic arm wielded by NASA astronaut Christina Koch inside the orbiting lab. The station and HTV-8, also known as Kounotori 8 (Kounotori means “white stork” in Japanese), were soaring 262 miles (422 kilometers) over Angola in southern Africa at the time.

“What you all have done is a testament to what we can accomplish when international teams work together towards a common goal,” Koch radioed to NASA’s Mission Control in Houston and flight controllers at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center in Japan. “We’re honored to have Kounotori on board, and look forward to a successful and productive mission together.”

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This week a new group of astronauts launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan headed for the International Space Station. The three new ISS crew members, Jessica Meir of NASA, Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos, and Hazza Ali Almansoori of the Emirati Space Agency docked with the station several hours later, temporarily taking the population of the station to nine people. That marks the largest crew aboard the ISS since 2015, but members of previous Expedition team 60 will be returning to Earth in around a week.

While the transferring of astronauts to and from the ISS is fairly standard for space agencies these days, there was something special about this mission. Astronaut Christina Koch was looking forward to being joined by her best friend and fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, so she decided to capture an image of the incoming craft from her perspective on board the ISS. The result is the stunning photo above, showing the ghostly trails from the first stage and the cloud of vapor around the craft.

The astronauts traveled aboard a Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft, docking at the station’s Zvezda service module six hours after launch. The crew will stay aboard the ISS for at least six months and will be working on scientific projects in varied fields including biology, physical sciences, and the development of new technologies. They will also perform upgrades to the stations including installing new lithium-ion batteries which collect power from the station’s solar panels, part of an ongoing project to update the ISS’s power system.

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Finally, the future that children of the ’80s want to see is on its way. NASA is working on its very own Transformer — a bot called Shapeshifter, made up of smaller robots which can combine into different configurations to roll, swim, fly, and float.

Shapeshifter is a prototype for exploring Saturn’s moon Titan. Before it ended its mission by burning up in Saturn’s rings, the Cassini probe flew by Titan more than one hundred times, observing the moon which is surprisingly similar to Earth. It has rivers, lakes, and rain, but instead of being made of water, these bodies are made of liquid methane and ethane. On Earth, these are gases, but in the freezing temperatures of Titan, they are liquid. Cassini collected mapping data of the surface, and scientists have been keen to discover more since then.

“We have very limited information about the composition of the surface [of Titan],” Ali Agha, Principal Investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. “Rocky terrain, methane lakes, cryovolcanoes — we potentially have all of these, but we don’t know for certain. So we thought about how to create a system that is versatile and capable of traversing different types of terrain but also compact enough to launch on a rocket.”

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The Moon’s subsurface is the key to its longterm development and sustainability, says NASA scientist.

A view of the Apollo 11 lunar module “Eagle” as it returned from the surface of the moon to dock … [+] with the command module “Columbia”. A smooth mare area is visible on the Moon below and a half-illuminated Earth hangs over the horizon. Command module pilot Michael Collins took this picture.

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