Space – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jun 11
2019

A 10-Year Odyssey: What Space Stations Will Look Like in 2030

NASA’s new plan for orbit conjures a striking view of government and commerce in space.

Jun 10
2019

Planetary Landscapes

🔥 Absolutely beautiful video created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during its flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and then Titan as it passes over Saturn and it’s edge-on rings. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/44583965185/?fbclid…quZjFTDy_s

Jun 10
2019

Mass anomaly detected under the moon’s largest crater

A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system—the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin—and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a Baylor University study.

“Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected,” said lead author Peter B. James.

Ph.D., assistant professor of planetary geophysics in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences. The crater itself is oval-shaped, as wide as 2,000 kilometers—roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C.—and several miles deep. Despite its size, it cannot be seen from Earth because it is on the far side of the Moon.

Jun 9
2019

Electrifying quantum dots for lasers

Compositional grading of colloidal quantum dots enables electrically driven amplification of light, bringing electrically driven lasers from these materials very close.

Jun 9
2019

50 Years Ago, Scientists Wanted to Build Solar Panels on The Moon

In 1969, scientists proposed building solar panels on the moon to convert the sun’s energy into electricity that can be used on Earth.

Jun 9
2019

Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft grabs epic close-up just 30 feet above asteroid

The Japanese asteroid-hunter had another photo opportunity when it dropped a target marker on asteroid Ryugu.

Jun 8
2019

Giant ‘thread’ of radio emissions found linking galaxy clusters

Scientists predicted that our universe’s structure resembles a huge web. We’ve finally seen one of the strands.

Jun 8
2019

This ‘Universe in a Box’ Has Enough Astronomical Data to Fill 30,000 Wikipedias

Adding to the largest astronomical data set ever assembled online, the Pan-STARRS telescope has posted 1.6 petabytes of data.

Jun 8
2019

NASA is opening the space station to $35,000-a-night visits. A tourist who paid Russia $30 million to get there a decade ago says it’s a ‘seismic shift.’

Richard Garriott, who spent two weeks visiting the space station in 2008, said NASA used to fight the idea of private ISS visitors.

Jun 7
2019

NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter

A beautiful abyss. This view of an area within a Jovian jet stream includes a vortex with an intensely dark center. Nearby, other features display bright, high altitude clouds that have puffed up into the sunlight.

I took this color-enhanced image on May 29, 2019, as I performed my 20th science flyby of Jupiter. At the time, I was about 9,200 miles (14,800 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops. Citizen scientists Gerald EichstÃ¤dt and SeÃ¡n Doran created this image using data from the JunoCam imager. Details: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/jupiter_abyss