Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s Perseverance rover is hightailing it to a fascinating river delta region in the Jezero Crater on Mars. But to get there, it first had to pass near its original landing site. Images from there are a trip down memory lane, back to when Percy dramatically landed on the red planet in February 2021.

Steve Ruff, Arizona State University associate research professor and Mars geologist, runs the Mars Guy channel on YouTube. He posted a video on Sunday recapping the rover’s arrival on mars and what happened to the parachute and back shell — two key components of the landing system that delivered Percy safely to the surface.

Can the US and Russia still collaborate in space?

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Continue reading “What Russia’s war means for the International Space Station” »

Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered the most distant star ever seen—through a cosmic fluke.

Nicknamed “Earendel,” the star’s light took 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, and scientists believe it emitted light throughout the first billion years of our universe’s existence. Beside its age, Earendel’s position is also curious. According to NASA, Hubble was able to detect the star thanks to gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which a massive object (like a galaxy) warps the fabric of space. When light reaches the warped space, it can act like a magnifying glass and highlight objects we’d otherwise have a difficult time seeing.

And that’s how Earendel—whose Old English name is akin to “morning star” or “rising light”—was found (though Tolkien fans will recognize it as a riff on Eärendil, the half-Elven seafarer who carried a Silmaril).

Vast object is falling towards the middle of the solar system – but will stop before it reaches us.

The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope is now moving into Phase 2 of development. It’ll be built by robots, into a natural bowl-shaped crater on the moon’s far side. If completed, it’ll be the largest radio telescope in the solar system.

The most distant exoplanet discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope (17,000 ly), the most distant individual star (12.9 billion ly), and the most distant galaxy ever seen (13.5 billion ly) have all been reported.

The system developed in Milano is robust and it also has the potential to process information encoded in different coupled systems, including far and enormous galaxies. Thanks to these new results, it is now possible to simulate in the lab complex coupled systems, with order altered by stable defects, difficult to be reproduced otherwise since involving ginormous scale, like galaxies, or part of extreme hydrodynamic systems.

Water whirlpools, smoke rings, violent tornados and spiral galaxies are all examples of twists in fluids, although very different each other. Analogous twists, but in the realm of light, have been created by the research group coordinated by Antonio Ambrosio at the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology), in Milano (Italy). The results, published in the journal Nature Photonics, show the realization of 100 light vortices, coupled to form an ordered structure, a light crystal.

Mutual interaction of light and nanostructured materials is the focus of the research of Antonio Ambrosio, Principal Investigator of the research line Vectorial Nano-imaging at IIT in Milano and grantee of the ERC Consolidator project “METAmorphoses.”

Continue reading “Optical vortex crystals for photonic simulations of complex systems” »

Renting space and IP addresses on a public server has become standard business practice, but according to a team of Penn State computer scientists, current industry practices can lead to “cloud squatting,” which can create a security risk, endangering sensitive customer and organization data intended to remain private.

Cloud squatting occurs when a company, such as your bank, leases space and IP addresses—unique addresses that identify individual computers or computer networks—on a public server, uses them, and then releases the space and addresses back to the public server company, a standard pattern seen every day. The public server company, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, then assigns the same addresses to a second company. If this second company is a bad actor, it can receive information coming into the address intended for the original company—for example, when you as a customer unknowingly use an outdated link when interacting with your bank—and use it to its advantage—cloud squatting.

“There are two advantages to leasing server space,” said Eric Pauley, doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. “One is a cost advantage, saving on equipment and management. The other is scalability. Leasing server space offers an unlimited pool of computing resources so, as workload changes, companies can quickly adapt.” As a result, the use of clouds has grown exponentially, meaning almost every website a user visits takes advantage of cloud computing.