Lifeboat Foundation

The orbiter has been snapping pictures of the Red Planet since 2006.

No, you’re not dreaming! An asteroid full of gold may have been discovered. We’ll fill you in about this unprecedented discovery.

As astonishing as it may seem, NASA may have discovered an asteroid filled with gold. According to International Business Times, NASA discovered this asteroid, called Psyche 16, between Mars and Jupiter.

Reports are that this celestial body is mainly composed of solid metals, such as gold, platinum, nickel, and iron.

It is one of the most astonishing results of physics: when a complex system is left alone, it will return to its initial state with almost perfect precision. Gas particles, for example, chaotically swirling around in a container, will return almost exactly to their starting positions after some time. This “Poincaré Recurrence Theorem” is the foundation of modern chaos theory. For decades, scientists have investigated how this theorem can be applied to the world of quantum physics. Now, researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) have successfully demonstrated a kind of “Poincaré recurrence” in a multi-particle quantum system. The results have been published in the journal Science.

An Old Question, Revisited

At the end of the 19th century, the French scientist Henri Poincaré studied systems which cannot be fully analysed with perfect precision — for example solar systems consisting of many planets and asteroids, or gas particles, which keep bumping into each other. His surprising result: every state which is physically possible will be occupied by the system at some point — at least to a very good degree of approximation. If we just wait long enough, at some point all planets will form a straight line, just by coincidence. The gas particles in a box will create interesting patterns, or go back to the state in which they were when the experiment started.

NASA still hasn’t decided whether Dragon will land in the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico.

Staging Area

The engineers say four reactors could give enough energy for a six-person crew to live on Mars, and they’re hoping to use the Moon as a testing ground.

“On the moon, you’re close to home,” NASA engineer Michelle Rucker told C&EN, “so if something fails, it’s a fairly close trip to get back home, whereas on Mars, your system better be working.”

NASA has released a stunning image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 5907.

Dust is on the way to the United States this week making the more than 6,000-mile journey from the Sahara Desert.

This might seem to work against typical weather patterns, but dust in the United States from the Sahara happens every year. While it may not be abnormal to see the Saharan dust make its annual journey to the United States, we are expected to see more of it than usual.

Tiny individual dust particles combine to make a large plume so big that it can be picked up on satellite images and even be seen from the International Space Station.

NASA scientists decided to explore whether — hypothetically — there are ocean planets in the Milky Way galaxy that are similar to the watery solar system moons Europa and Enceladus.

Laser labs that detect ripples in space-time may have witnessed a new class of cosmic object.