Lifeboat Foundation

🌖 What will the Moon look like throughout 2020? Using data from our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to visualize with unprecedented fidelity, NASA Goddard’s Dial-a-Moon shows you the Moon each hour: https://go.nasa.gov/37sKofB

Watch a full year of Moon phases from the Northern Hemisphere: https://go.nasa.gov/2udsqPY

From the Southern Hemisphere: https://go.nasa.gov/2QHYt1U

No one really knows what happens inside an atom. But two competing groups of scientists think they’ve figured it out. And both are racing to prove that their own vision is correct.

Here’s what we know for sure: Electrons whiz around “orbitals” in an atom’s outer shell. Then there’s a whole lot of empty space. And then, right in the center of that space, there’s a tiny nucleus — a dense knot of protons and neutrons that give the atom most of its mass. Those protons and neutrons cluster together, bound by what’s called the strong force. And the numbers of those protons and neutrons determine whether the atom is iron or oxygen or xenon, and whether it’s radioactive or stable.

Breakthroughs include measuring the true nature of the universe, finding new species of human ancestors, and unlocking new ways to fight disease.

What can you see in the night sky this month? The peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower, Mars rises with its “rival” — the red giant star Antares — and the Moon and Venus pair up.

Get more info and sky charts at https://go.nasa.gov/2OI1iiA

Range of gravitational field cannot be shorter than 18 trillion kilometres.

Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist.

Playing with fire can be dangerous and never more so than when confined in a space capsule floating 250 miles above the Earth. But in the past week astronauts onboard the International Space Station have intentionally lit a series of blazes in research designed to study the behaviour of flames in zero gravity.

The scientists behind the experiment, called Confined Combustion, say it will help improve fire safety on the ISS and on future lunar missions by helping predict how a blaze might progress in low gravity conditions.

Dr Paul Ferkul, of the Universities Space Research Association, who is working on the project, said: “That is the immediate and most practical goal since NASA can use the knowledge to improve material selection and fire safety strategies.”

In 1900, so the story goes, prominent physicist Lord Kelvin addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science with these words: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.”

How wrong he was. The following century completely turned physics on its head. A huge number of theoretical and experimental discoveries have transformed our understanding of the universe, and our place within it.

Don’t expect the next century to be any different. The universe has many mysteries that still remain to be uncovered – and new technologies will help us to solve them over the next 50 years.

No other planet in our solar system has rings as splendid as Saturn’s. They are so expansive and bright that they were discovered as soon as humans began pointing telescopes at the night sky: