Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 883

The Himalayan Range includes some of the youngest and most spectacular mountains on Earth, but the rugged landscape that lends it the striking beauty for which it is known can also keep scientists from fully understanding how these mountains formed. “We know more about the rocks on parts of Mars than we do about some of the areas in the Himalaya,” said Dr. Alka Tripathy-Lang.

“Many researchers have done extraordinary geologic mapping in this rugged region, but the fact is that some places are just completely inaccessible because of topography, elevation, or geopolitical issues. The rocks in those areas are an important piece of the tectonic puzzle and are important for understanding the way the region evolved,” said Dr. Wendy Bohon. “The tools we used, originally developed for mapping rocks on Mars, were a way to safely access information about the rocks in the Himalayas.”

Bohon and colleagues worked with researchers at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University to use data from the Earth orbiting satellite Terra in the same way planetary geologists have been using data from the Mars orbiting satellite Odyssey.

Read more

We don’t actually have a lot to be afraid of when it comes to asteroids. Sure, they might come pretty close from time to time, but they tend to buzz harmlessly by — after all, Earth is a pretty tiny target in the vastness of space.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be prepared, though — and NASA, along with several other US federal agencies, has been putting together a contingency plan.

They’ve called the collective the Interagency Working Group for Detecting and Mitigating the Impact of Earth-bound Near-Earth Objects, or DAMIEN, which isn’t ominous at all, and released a 20-page document that outlines the asteroid — or near-Earth object (NEO) — plans for the next decade.

Read more

Filipinos have achieved yet another milestone after contacting with the International Space Station, even interviewing an astronaut on board the habitable artificial satellite.

By Dhel Nazario

Filipinos have achieved yet another milestone after contacting with the International Space Station (ISS), even interviewing an astronaut on board the habitable artificial satellite.

A mix of Grade 11 and college students from the from the University of the Philippines Integrated School (UPIS) and electronics engineering students from the Holy Angel University (HAU) made the historical feat at the Department of Science and Technology –Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) last May.

Continue reading “Students make first ever live interview with astronaut from the ISS” | >

One night, as I was putting my daughter to bed and waiting for her to fall asleep, I tried to think of some new markets for space utilization.

We often hear about attempts to find industrial uses for microgravity for growing crystals, for purification of electronic materials (which is an actual thing with ACME Advanced Materials: http://www.a2-m.com/), maybe growth of certain metal foams, etc. However, in space, you’re in both a hard vacuum and not physically resting on anything, so you can spin up something, and it will simply keep on spinning (stably, if you spin it around the correct axis) nearly indefinitely without any additional energy input and no wear on bearings or anything. So in fact, you can get basically any gravity level you want, including HYPERgravity, nearly for free.

What are the applications of this?

Read more