Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 739

An international team of scientists has figured out how to capture heat and turn it into electricity.

The discovery, published last week in the journal Science Advances, could create more efficient generation from heat in things like car exhaust, interplanetary space probes and .

“Because of this discovery, we should be able to make more out of heat than we do today,” said study co-author Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology at The Ohio State University. “It’s something that, until now, nobody thought was possible.”

Read more | >

India’s space programme has thus far been a government-backed effort. But now that is changing, with the emergence of a clutch of space technology startups. From propulsion and rocket technology ventures such as Bellatrix, to satellite makers such as Dhruva Space and Team Indus that aspire to bid for entire programmes rather than supply piece-meal components, there are now about two dozen startups in this field compared to only a handful three years ago.

India’s space programme has, so far, been a government backed effort with Isro. With new technology and falling costs, a clutch of space technology startups are garnering domestic and global clients.

Read more | >

Galaxies come in all shapes and sizes, and the galaxies most pleasing to the eye are always in the most recognizable shapes. Dramatic spirals with outstretched arms, bursting with newborn stars are always a jaw-dropping sight, after all. Messier 110 is most definitely not in that group.

Messier 110 is what is known as an elliptical galaxy. It doesn’t have well-formed features, and it’s not a swirling mass of eye candy. It’s just a big blob of stars hanging out around the nearby Andromeda galaxy. As far as galaxies go, it’s rather small, but NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has a certain knack for making even “small” destinations in space look larger than life.

As NASA explains, this photo of Messier 110 reveals the galaxy’s true personality. It’s not particularly flashy or fun, but it is absolutely packed with stars, and while there are no obvious star nurseries to be seen, scientists think new stars are still being born here.

Read more | >

After a 10-month journey from Earth, the MAVEN spacecraft entered Mars orbit on September 21, 2014. The mission €”originally planned to gather data for one-Earth-year €”continues to provide unique insight into the history of #Mars ’ atmosphere and climate, liquid water, and planetary habitability.

It is a tremendous credit to the entire MAVEN team that the instruments and spacecraft continue to operate well and that the science continues to provide exciting results related to the #Martian upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the Sun and solar wind.

Read more | >

Next October, Venus will be the focus of an international campaign of coordinated observations involving two space agencies, three missions and multiple ground-based telescopes and planetary scientists around the world. The collaboration aims to shed new light on the thick and complex atmosphere of Venus. Plans for the campaign and a call for astronomers to participate have been announced today by Dr. Yeon Joo Lee of TU Berlin and Dr. Valeria Mangano of INAF-IAPS at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting in Geneva.

On 15th October 2020, the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft will pass close to Venus in the first of two flybys of the planet during the mission’s long journey to Mercury. The encounter will provide an unmissable opportunity to cross-check the accuracy of BepiColombo’s instrumentation with that of JAXA’s Venus orbiter, Akatsuki, and for the two missions to work together with Earth-based observers to study Venus’s atmosphere from multiple viewpoints and at different scales.

The BepiColombo mission was successfully launched on October 20th 2018, at 01:45 UTC. It consists of two scientific orbiters, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, renamed at launch Mio’), which are designed to explore Mercury and its environment. The mission will go into orbit around Mercury in December 2025. BepiColombo will use encounters with Venus in October 2020 and August 2021 to help it spiral onto an orbital path where it can catch up with fast-moving Mercury, which whizzes round the Sun every 88 days.

Read more | >

Venus likely maintained stable temperatures and hosted liquid water for billions of years before an event triggered drastic changes in the planet, according to a new study.

Now, Venus is a mostly dead planet with a toxic atmosphere 90 times thicker than ours and surface temperatures that reach 864 degrees, hot enough to melt lead. It’s often called Earth’s twin because the planets are similar in size. But the modern comparisons stop there.

However, a recent study compared five climate simulations of Venus’ past and every scenario suggested that the planet could support liquid water and a temperate climate on its surface for at least three billion years. Like the other planets in our solar system, Venus formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Read more | >