Lifeboat Foundation

A unique training program has teams of astronauts spending time inside caves doing experiments and learning to work together in a challenging environment.

We’re accustomed to astronauts pulling off their missions without a hitch. They head up to the International Space Station for months at a time and do what they do, then come home. But upcoming missions to the surface of the Moon, and maybe Mars, present a whole new set of challenges.

One way astronauts are preparing for those challenges is by exploring the extreme environment inside caves.

Continue reading “Astronauts Explore Caves on Earth, Learning the Skills They’ll Need for the Moon and Mars” »

The comet was discovered in January and may be bright enough to see without a telescope.

In 2022, our first planetary defense test mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), will attempt to change the motion of a small moonlet, Dimorphos, that poses no threat to Earth. This demonstration, led by the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), will test a new asteroid deflection technology: www.nasa.gov/dart

Innovating And Investing In The New Space Age — Space 2.0 — Hélène Huby, VP, Orion-ESM, Airbus Defence and Space.

Hélène Huby is Vice-President of the Orion European Service Module (Orion-ESM), at Airbus Defence & Space.

Continue reading “Hélène Huby, VP, Orion-ESM, Airbus Defence and Space — Innovating And Investing In The New Space Age” »

A pair of researchers from Toho University and NASA Nexus for Exoplanet System Science has found evidence, via simulation, that Earth will lose its oxygen-rich atmosphere in approximately 1 billion years. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Kazumi Ozaki and Christopher Reinhard describe the factors that went into their simulation and what it showed.

Today, at a special AR/VR focused event held inside its virtual reality community platform Altspace, Microsoft showcased a new product aiming to provide their AR HoloLens platform and VR Windows Mixed Reality platform with a shared platform for meetings.

The app is called Microsoft Mesh and it gives users a cross AR/VR meeting space to interact with other users and 3D content, handling all of technical hard parts of sharing spatial multi-player experiences over the web. Like Microsoft’s other AR/VR apps, the sell seems to be less in the software than it is in enabling developers to tap into one more specialization of Azure, building their own software that builds on the capabilities. The company announced that AltspaceVR will now be Mesh-enabled.

In the company’s presentation, they swung for the fences in showcasing potential use cases, bringing in James Cameron, the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil and Pokémon Go developer Niantic.

Using NASA’s Fermi spacecraft, astronomers have conducted a long-term monitoring campaign of a blazar known as S5 1803+784 and have identified several gamma-ray and optical flares from this source. The finding is detailed in a paper published February 19 on arXiv.org.

How do you keep microbes from Earth from contaminating Mars? This NASA scientist, who worked on the Perseverance mission, explains: # CountdowntoMars # Mars2020.

Laser-cooled plasma-in-a-bottle could answer questions about the sun, fusion power. Rice University physicists have discovered a way to trap the world’s coldest plasma in a magnetic bottle, a technological achievement that could advance research into clean energy, space weather and astrophysics.