ASgamma experiment sheds light on how pulsars act as particle accelerators.
Category: space – Page 765
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Fifty years ago this month, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission transformed the idea of putting people on the moon from science fiction to historical fact. Not much has changed on the moon since Apollo, but if the visions floated by leading space scientists from the U.S., Europe, Russia and China come to pass, your grandchildren might be firing up lunar barbecues in 2069.
“Definitely in 50 years, there will be more tourism on the moon,” Anatoli Petrukovich, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Space Research Institute, said here today during the World Conference of Science Journalists. “The moon will just look like a resort, as a backyard for grilling some meat or whatever else.”
Wu Ji, former director general of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Space Science Center, agreed that moon tourism could well be a thing in 2069.
NASA has awarded Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Astrobotic a US$5.6 million contract to build a new suitcase-sized robotic lunar rover that could land on the Moon as soon as 2021. One of 12 proposals selected as part of the agency’s Lunar Surface and Instrumentation and Technology Payload (LSITP) program, the 24-lb (11-kg) MoonRanger rover is designed to operate autonomously on week-long missions within 0.6 mi (1 km) of its lander.
Nestled amongst glaciers in one of the world’s most remote and volcanically active island ranges lies an incredibly rare lake of lava only now confirmed by scientists in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research.
Residing on Saunders Island in the South Sandwich Islands, measuring between 90 and 215 meters (295 and 700 feet) in diameter, and with temperatures soaring above 1,200°C (2,160°F), the lava lake of Mount Michel joins just seven other known features of this nature on Earth. Lava lakes are extremely rare with even the most persistent ceasing after just a century.
“We are delighted to have discovered such a remarkable geological feature in the British Overseas Territory,” said study author and geologist Alex Burton-Johnson in a statement. “Identifying the lava lake has improved our understanding of the volcanic activity and hazard on this remote island, and tells us more about these rare features, and finally, it has helped us develop techniques to monitor volcanoes from space.”
For the first time, researchers have been able to observe the atmosphere of a planet between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. Gliese 3470 b is a world 96 light-years away, orbiting a star roughly half the size of the Sun. It is 12.6 times the mass of our planet and slightly smaller than Neptune, which weighs 17 times the mass of the Earth.
As reported in Nature Astronomy, this planet delivered quite the surprise to astronomers. Using the combined power of the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer infrared observatory, they discovered a clear atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, the main components of stars.
“We expected an atmosphere strongly enriched in heavier elements like oxygen and carbon which are forming abundant water vapor and methane gas, similar to what we see on Neptune,” lead author Björn Benneke, of the University of Montreal, said in a statement. “Instead, we found an atmosphere that is so poor in heavy elements that its composition resembles the hydrogen/helium-rich composition of the Sun.”
Mars colony in artificial, domed canyon
Posted in space
Design of what could be a human colony in a narrow, artificial, domed canyon on Mars by LAVA architects.
Every type of atom in the universe has a unique fingerprint: It only absorbs or emits light at the particular energies that match the allowed orbits of its electrons. That fingerprint enables scientists to identify an atom wherever it is found. A hydrogen atom in outer space absorbs light at the same energies as one on Earth.
Last month, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrapped up the installation of the Mars 2020 rover’s 2.1-meter-long robot arm. This is the most powerful arm ever installed on a Mars rover. Even though the Mars 2020 rover shares much of its design with Curiosity, the new arm was redesigned to be able to do much more complex science, drilling into rocks to collect samples that can be stored for later recovery.
JPL is well known for developing robots that do amazing work in incredibly distant and hostile environments. The Opportunity Mars rover, to name just one example, had a 90-day planned mission but remained operational for 5,498 days in a robot unfriendly place full of dust and wild temperature swings where even the most basic maintenance or repair is utterly impossible. (Its twin rover, Spirit, operated for 2,269 days.)
To learn more about the process behind designing robotic systems that are capable of feats like these, we talked with Matt Robinson, one of the engineers who designed the Mars 2020 rover’s new robot arm.
Photographer Albert Dros may have captured one of the coolest photos of yesterday’s total solar eclipse in Chile. In addition to a few striking photos of a his model, Bart Lablans, standing next to the eclipse, he also managed to capture Bart “holding” it at totality. Take that cliché Leaning Tower of Pisa photos.
The photo was captured as part of a group organized by Dream Photo Tours and NatPhoto. But instead of using this rare opportunity to capture a standard photo of the eclipse, Dros tells PetaPixel that he decided to get creative. “I decided to improvise a little bit on the spot and photograph a model doing some poses in front of the eclipse,” he tells us. “This was possible as there was a hill nearby that fit the angle of the eclipse perfectly.”
The resulting images were captured using a 100-400mm lens and 1.4x teleconverter, which allowed him to compress the background sufficiently to capture “both the moon and the person at a nice size in the frame.” After a little bit of additional cropping in post, here is what he ended up with: