Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s InSight mission aims to send a lander to Mars to study the crust, mantle, and core of the red planet. Launched in May this year, InSight is now nearly at its destination and will soon be touching down on the surface of Mars.

NASA has shared details on how it will monitor the touching down of the lander at the end of its 91 million mile journey. The first tools it will use are radio telescopes, which can pick up simple radio signals. As the lander descends into the Mars atmosphere, it will send out radio signals that researchers back home at NASA can pick up. Two locations will be listening out for the signal: one at the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia and one at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy’s facility at Effelsberg, Germany. These radio signals cannot give data about what the lander finds, but they can be used to work out basic information like what at speed the lander is descending thanks to the Doppler effect in which the frequency of a sound wave is affected by the movement of the source relative to the observer.

More detailed information about the lander will be gathered using two small spacecraft called Mars Cube One (MarCO). The MarCOs are each about the size of a briefcase and are an experimental technology that should fly behind the InSight lander and relay data back to Earth in real-time. They may even be able to capture an image of the surface of Mars as soon as the lander touches down.

Archaeologists unearthed Tenea, which is thought to have been founded by Trojans. They also found tombs, coins and urns, among other items, in and around the city.

The InSight spacecraft is ready to rumble.

Europe is leading one of the most important space travel efforts of this century.

The new service lets consumers contribute to medical research, but still poses privacy concerns.

• By Karen Weintraub on November 17, 2018

NASA engineers are using some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to design rotary wing vehicles that combine both piloted and autonomous operations. Urban Air Mobility is a safe and efficient system that can transport a small number of passengers and cargo, without the need for long runways. Check it out: https://go.nasa.gov/2FvGPfH

Breakthrough.

A new way of transplanting stem cells into a damaged heart could be a way of reversing heart disease. New developments are continually finding ways of helping people to regenerate and heal in ways never before possible.

Amidst the ongoing threat of the California wildfires, a Tesla Model 3 owner has posted a brief demonstration of the electric sedan’s capability to maintain the air quality inside its cabin, despite the vehicle not being equipped with the Model S and X’s hospital-grade HEPA filter or a dedicated “Bioweapon Defense Mode.”

Elon Musk took to Twitter last week to offer the Model S and Model X as vehicles that can be used to transport people away from the ongoing CA wildfires. The Model S and X are capable of scrubbing the air inside the car, thanks to their large HEPA filters that are fitted with separate acid and alkaline gas neutralization layers. Later social media updates and anecdotes from Model S and X owners driving through the CA area indicate that Bioweapon Defense Mode helped maintain the air quality inside their vehicles.

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