Lifeboat Foundation

The Spiral of the Southern Pinwheel The Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was originally designed for the Dark Energy Survey, has captured one of the deepest images ever taken of Messier 83, a spiral galaxy playfully known as the Southern Pinwheel. Built by the US Department of Energy, DECam is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab.

SpaceX has launched another batch of its Starlink satellites — the usual complement of 60 of the low Earth orbit spacecraft, which will join the more than 1000 already making up the existing constellation. This is the fifth launch of Starlink satellites for SpaceX this year, and the twentieth overall.

Earlier this year, SpaceX opened up Starlink access to anyone in a current or planned service area via a pre-order reservation system with a refundable up-front deposit. The company aims to continue launches like this one apace throughout 2021 in order to get the constellation to the point where it can serve customers over a much larger portion of the globe. SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell has previously said that the company expects it should have coverage over much of the globe at a constellation size of around 1200 satellites, but the company has plans to launch more than 30000 to fully build out its network capacity and speed.

While SpaceX is making good progress on Starlink with its Falcon 9 launcher, it’s also looking ahead to Starship as a key driver of the constellation’s growth. Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle currently under development in South Texas, will be able to deliver to orbit 400 Starlink satellites at a time, and it’s also being designed with full reusability and fast turnaround in mind.

After his PhD thesis invalidates an old assumption, Norman Cao wonders what’s next.

“What are some challenges in controlling plasma and what are your solutions? What is the most effective type of fusion device? What are some difficulties in sustaining fusion conditions? What are some obstacles to receiving fusion funding?”

For the past four years, graduate student Norman Cao ’15 PhD ’20 has been the Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s (PSFC’s) go-to “answer man,” replying to questions like these emailed by students and members of the general public interested in getting a deeper understanding of fusion and its potential as a future energy source.

Satellite observations have revealed an unprecedented ‘space hurricane’ in Earth’s upper atmosphere, hinting that such events could occur on other planetary bodies.

Scientists have previously documented hurricanes in the lower atmospheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Similar phenomena have even been spotted on the Sun. But the existence of space hurricanes — hurricane-like circulation patterns in planets’ upper atmospheres — has been uncertain.

Earth’s upper atmosphere cooks up a storm.

NEW: A microchip carrying more than 27,000 Civil Air Patrol names with related messages and images is set to be carried to the moon later this year aboard space robotics company Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. https://www.cap.news/next-stop-the-moon-for-27000-cap-names/

A microchip carrying more than 27000 Civil Air Patrol names with related messages and images is set to be carried to the moon later this year aboard space robotics company Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander.

They may not be black or holes.

Black holes may not be black or holes, a new theory proposes.

A silicone robot has survived a journey to 10900 metres below the ocean’s surface in the Mariana trench, where the crushing pressure can implode all but the strongest enclosures. This device could lead to lighter and more nimble submersible designs.

A team led by Guorui Li at Zhejiang University in China based the robot’s design on snailfish, which have relatively delicate, soft bodies and are among the deepest-living fish. They have been observed swimming at depths of more than 8000 metres.

The submersible robot looks a bit like a manta ray and is 22 centimetres long and 28 centimetres in wingspan. It is made of silicone rubber with electronic components spread throughout the body and connected by wires, rather than mounted on a circuit board like most submersibles. That’s because the team found in tests that the connections between components on rigid circuit boards were a weak point when placed under high pressure.

Supermassive black holes in the Milky Way and Andromeda will engulf each other less than 17 million years after the galaxies merge, simulations show.

Israel is investing 1.25 billion NIS in a national initiative to build up quantum proficiency, and this project in particular is part of that initiative.