Lifeboat Foundation

The eruption of Kilauea Volcano on the island of Hawaii triggered a number of gas- and lava-oozing fissures in the East Riff Zone of the volcano. The fissures and high levels of sulfur dioxide gas prompted evacuations in the area.

Images taken from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) onboard NASA’s Terra satellite picked up these new fissures. In the first image, the red areas are vegetation, and the black and gray areas are old lava flows. The yellow areas superimposed over the image show hot spots that were detected by ASTER’s thermal infrared bands. These hot spots are the newly formed fissures and new lava flow as of May 6. In the second photo, also acquired on May 6, the long yellow and green streaks are plumes of sulfur dioxide gas.

On April 30, the floor of Kilauea’s crater began to collapse. Earthquakes followed, including one that measured magnitude 6.9, and lava was pushed into new underground areas that eventually broke through the ground in such areas as the Leilani Estates.

One of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) is producing an artificial star — a guide star — in the skies above the Atacama desert, above the flowing Milky Way.

The Four Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF) shines four 22-watt laser beams into the sky to create artificial guide stars by making sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow so that they look just like real stars. The artificial stars allow the adaptive optics systems to compensate for the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere and so that the telescope can create sharp images.

NASA Langley researchers are experts in modeling and simulations for entry, descent and landing, working on missions since the Viking lander in 1976. In this episode, we explore the challenges of guiding landers like Mars InSight through the Martian atmosphere for a safe landing. Watch InSight launch as early as May 5, 2018! NASA Technology #JourneytoMars

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Additional challenges for those who want to colonize Mars…

Mars was once lush with water. A new analysis of Martian climate data shows a mechanism that might have helped dehydrate the planet.

Massive.

Giant, continent-sized storms were observed by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

“Thanks to the amazing increase in accuracy brought by Juno’s gravity data, we have essentially solved the issue of how Jupiter rotates: The zones and belts that we see in the atmosphere rotating at different speeds extend to about 1,900 miles (3,000 km),” Tristan Guillot, of the University of Côte d’Azur in France, said in that statement, according to LiveScience.

Continue reading “Jupiter’s Continent-Sized Storms Photographed by NASA’s Juno Spacecraft” »

Nuclear power in space is still being pursued for future deep space missions…

A nuclear power plant that could provide power for long-duration crewed missions has passed another developmental milestone at NASA.

A new proof by SFI Professor David Wolpert sends a humbling message to would-be super intelligences: you can’t know everything all the time.

The proof starts by mathematically formalizing the way an “inference device,” say, a scientist armed with a supercomputer, fabulous experimental equipment, etc., can have knowledge about the state of the universe around them. Whether that scientist’s knowledge is acquired by observing their universe, controlling it, predicting what will happen next, or inferring what happened in the past, there’s a mathematical structure that restricts that knowledge. The key is that the inference device, their knowledge, and the physical variable that they (may) know something about, are all subsystems of the same universe. That coupling restricts what the device can know. In particular, Wolpert proves that there is always something that the inference device cannot predict, and something that they cannot remember, and something that they cannot observe.

“In some ways this formalism can be viewed as many different extensions of [Donald MacKay’s] statement that ‘a prediction concerning the narrator’s future cannot account for the effect of the narrator’s learning that prediction,’” Wolpert explains. “Perhaps the simplest extension is that, when we formalize [inference devices] mathematically, we notice that the same impossibility results that hold for predictions of the future—MacKay’s concern—also hold for memories of the past. Time is an arbitrary variable—it plays no role in terms of differing states of the universe.”

Continue reading “New proof reveals fundamental limits of scientific knowledge” »

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is sending a robotic geologist to Mars that will dig deeper than ever before.

The Mars InSight spacecraft is set to launch this weekend from California.

The lander has a slender probe designed to burrow nearly 16 feet into the Martian soil. That’s for taking the planet’s temperature. To take the planet’s pulse, a quake-measuring seismometer will operate directly on the Martian surface.

Continue reading “NASA sending robotic geologist to Mars to dig super deep” »