Lifeboat Foundation

Detailed data on space-time ripples are set to pour in from LIGO and Virgo’s upgraded detectors.

India’s anti-satellite missile test created at least 400 pieces of orbital debris, the head of NASA says — placing the International Space Station (ISS) and its astronauts at risk.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Monday that just 60 pieces of debris were large enough to track. Of those, 24 went above the apogee of the ISS, the point of the space station’s orbit farthest from the Earth.

“That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” Bridenstine said in a live-streamed NASA town hall meeting. “That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight.”

Continue reading “India anti-satellite missile test a ‘terrible thing,’ NASA chief says” »

Discovering planets that nobody has ever seen before is even harder than it sounds. Space telescopes from NASA and other scientific bodies have gathered an incredible amount of data that will take astronomers years and years to sift through, and many times there’s just nothing there to be found.

But humans don’t have to do all of the work, and Anne Dattilo, a senior at the University of Texas in Austin enlisted the help of artificial intelligence to study data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and found not one, but two new exoplanets in the process.

Engineers have been tinkering with ship’s trajectory to realign before leaving the Earth’s orbit and entering the lunar orbit on Thursday.

Satellite measurements of sulfur dioxide from volcanic eruptions could help keep aircraft safe from hazardous ash.

The most popular contender over the past few decades has been string theory, and the related concepts of superstring theory and M-theory, in which particles are considered as tiny units of one-dimensional string. However, a lesser-known theory has also gained traction; loop quantum gravity (LQG), which attempts to solve the quantum gravity problem by focusing on the very fabric of spacetime, rather than the particles themselves.

In “Quantum Space,” the popular-science writer Jim Baggott lays out the basic principles of LQG for science enthusiasts. The book looks at how loop quantum gravity has emerged by following the work of two of its leading proponents, Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin, and assesses where the theory is now, and where it might be going.

Although the concepts are — not surprisingly — mind-boggling, Baggott asks deep questions about the nature of the universe, what space is actually composed of, and the existence of time itself. (The book covers a lot of challenging material, however, and some prior reading may help readers find their way.)

The galaxies have never before been captured in such detail.

First discovered in 1784 by William Herschel, NGC 6052 was originally thought to be a singular galaxy that simply had an odd shape.

However, scientists eventually figured out that the “oddly shaped galaxy” 230 million light-years away was, in fact, two galaxies in the process of colliding.

Continue reading “NASA released a stunning photo showing two galaxies colliding” »

A few days back we talked about a joint NASA and ESA study that was being conducted in Germany looking at long term effects of weightlessness on astronauts and how artificial gravity might help them. More details have surfaced about that study, and it pays very well for doing nothing but laying in bed. The study pays participants $19,000 (16,500 euro) and is known as AGBRESA study 2019.

The broadcaster talks to BuzzFeed News about his new Netflix show Our Planet, why we need to get off our screens and how there are so many more species on our planet we’ve yet to discover.