Lifeboat Foundation

If you thought the Kepler spacecraft’s glory days were over, think again. Today at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, astronomers announced a whopping 234 new exoplanet candidates discovered by Kepler in 2014. The best part? All of them are just tens of light years away.

The deluge of planetary candidates are distributed among 208 star systems, which means we have the honor of welcoming many new multi-planet systems to our cosmic neighborhood. While these candidates aren’t confirmed yet, there’s a good chance most of them will be, according to Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, who presented the findings today. All 234 were found during the first year of the K2 mission, which is scanning stars across the plane of our solar system, moving from one field of view to the next.

Add these K2 planets to the 4,600+ candidate worlds (1,918 confirmed planets) discovered during Kepler’s original mission, and it’s fair to say this little telescope has become one hell of a planet hunter.

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After US passed the Space Act, space mining is going to happen.

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Much more than marketing, the experience lets users feel what it’s like to survive on Mars, just like Mark Watney. Yes, there are potatoes.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njCDZWTI-xg

LIVE Video From The International Space Station (ISS), NASA : Earth From Space

MY LATEST UPLOAD: Spectacular Saturn — Images from the Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft.

Continue reading “NASA Video : Earth From Space Real Footage — Video From The International Space Station ISS” »

Some people take the new year as an opportunity to contemplate their goals; Alan Lightman, writing in the January issue of Harper’s magazine, takes the opportunity to contemplate the creation of the universe.

It’s a topic too vast and unimaginable for most of us to wrap our brains around, but Lightman brings his considerable skills as both physicist (he teaches at MIT) and novelist (“Einstein’s Dreams”) to introduce us to a “small platoon of physicists” who focus on figuring out such things as what happened at the very first moment of the big bang, whether time or anything else existed before it, and exactly how we distinguish the future from the past.

And they expect, sometime in the next 50 years or so, to have some real answers.

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Newly released documents describe the U.S. Air Force’s secret cold war project known as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL)

By Leonard David, SPACE.com on January 4, 2016.

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In late May, mathematician Eric Weinstein gave a talk at Oxford University about his ideas about “Geometric Unity,” a mathematical theory that purports to explain why the universe works the way it does. Weinstein He earned a 1992 Ph.D [in Mathematical Physics from Harvard University and has since held a Lady Davis Fellowship in the Racah Institute ofPhysics at Hebrew University, an NSF fellowship in the mathematics Department of MIT.

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It’s a global space race to live on the moon. Around 26 nations want to figure out what that’s going to look like.

In the past, NASA has been a big fan of expandable, inflatable modules, like the ones made by Bigelow Aerospace. The ESA’s concept art shows buildings made out of the natural elements found on the lunar surface. This idea isn’t far-fetched; product designers have used sand to print in the past.

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The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) may have to delay the first test flight of its experimental Reusable Launch Vehicle-Technology Demonstrator (RLV-TD) spaceplane. The unmanned sub-orbital spacecraft, which is similar in design to the US Air Force’s X-37B, was scheduled to be launched in February, but technical difficulties may put back the flight to the first week of April.

According to a report in the New Indian Express, a minor leak in the flight systems of the RLV-TD led to the potential setback. K Sivan, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), where the craft is being developed, told the paper that the spacecraft needed to be reassembled, which could cause a significant delay if more problems occur.

The RLV-TD is a two-stage scaled prototype of India’s Avatar spacecraft designed to drastically reduce the cost of launching payloads into orbit from US$5,000 per kilogram (2.2 lb) to US$500. RLV-TD is a winged technology demonstrator for testing flight and propulsion systems that will allow the completed Avatar to return to Earth for a controlled landing like a conventional aircraft.

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