Lifeboat Foundation

In July of 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made history when it became the first robotic explorer to conduct a flyby of Pluto. This was followed by another first, when the NASA mission conducted the first flyby of a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) on December 31st, 2018 – which has since been named Arrokoth. Now, on the edge of the Solar System, New Horizons is still yielding some groundbreaking views of the cosmos.

For example, we here on Earth are used to thinking that the positions of the stars are “fixed”. In a sense, they are, since their positions and motions are relatively uniform when seen from our perspective. But a recent experiment conducted by the New Horizons team shows how familiar stars like Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 (two of the closest stars in our neighbors) look different when viewed from the edge of the Solar System.

Located in the constellation Leo, Wolf 359 is an M-type (red dwarf) star that is roughly 7.9 light-years from Earth. It can be found close to the same path the Sun follows through the sky (the ecliptic), but can only be seen with a telescope. And if you’re a Trekkie, you might recognize the name since it was where that major battle with the Borg took place (don’t act like you don’t know!)

Rational design of compounds with specific properties requires understanding and fast evaluation of molecular properties throughout chemical compound space — the huge set of all potentially stable molecules. Recent advances in combining quantum-mechanical calculations with machine learning provide powerful tools for exploring wide swathes of chemical compound space. We present our perspective on this exciting and quickly developing field by discussing key advances in the development and applications of quantum-mechanics-based machine-learning methods to diverse compounds and properties, and outlining the challenges ahead. We argue that significant progress in the exploration and understanding of chemical compound space can be made through a systematic combination of rigorous physical theories, comprehensive synthetic data sets of microscopic and macroscopic properties, and modern machine-learning methods that account for physical and chemical knowledge.

An international collaboration of scientists has recorded the most accurate confirmation to date for one of the cornerstones of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, ‘the universality of free fall.’

The new research shows that the theory holds for strongly self-gravitating objects such as neutron stars. Using a radio telescope, scientists can very accurately observe the signal produced by pulsars, a type of neutron star and test the validity of Einstein’s theory of gravity for these extreme objects. In particular, the team analyzed the signals from a pulsar named ‘PSR J0337+1715’ recorded by the large radio telescope of Nançay, located in the heart of Sologne (France).

The universality of free fall principle states that two bodies dropped in a gravitational field undergo the very same acceleration independently of their composition. This was first demonstrated by Galileo who famously would have dropped objects of different masses from the top of Pisa’s tower to verify that they both reach the ground simultaneously.

Please listen to the second episode of my new Cosmic Controversy Podcast. This week’s guest is planetary scientist Stephen Kane at the University of California, Riverside, who discusses why Venus is so haunting and beguiling all at once.

In this wide-ranging interview, planetary scientist Stephen Kane of the University of California, Riverside, delves into the mysteries of our neighbor planet Venus. We discuss how Venus went wrong and why understanding its evolution is so important in characterizing extrasolar planetary systems like our own.

The SolarStratos will gain its power from 240 square feet of solar panels on its wings.

#NASA

#SpaceFun

#NASA #SpaceFun

Sending a rover to the Red Planet is more than just 3…2…1… Liftoff! 🚀 It takes 1,000s of people and years of hard work to get a spacecraft from Earth to Mars. So when NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover touches down on the Martian surface, it will be because of the talented NASA minds that helped to make it happen.

Follow the journey of Perseverance: mars.nasa.gov/mars2020

Today, stars fill the night sky. But when the universe was in its infancy, it contained no stars at all. And an international team of scientists is closer than ever to detecting, measuring and studying a signal from this era that has been traveling through the cosmos ever since that starless era ended some 13 billion years ago.

That team—led by researchers at the University of Washington, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University and Brown University—reported last year in the Astrophysical Journal that it had achieved an almost 10-fold improvement of radio emission data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array. Team members are currently scouring the data from this radio telescope in remote Western Australia for a telltale signal from this poorly understood “dark age” of our universe.

Learning about this period will help address major questions about the universe today.

An instrument on board the International Space Station contains one of the coldest places in the universe, and researchers have used it to create a cloud of frozen atoms.