Lifeboat Foundation

Getting astronauts to Mars will be far from a cakewalk. In order to safely land a crewed ship on the surface of the red planet, the agency needs to invent things that don’t yet exist. And we’re not talking about just one or two or five new gadgets. NASA is working on a staggering 40 new technologies in order to meet a 2033 deadline for launching a crew to Mars that can live on the planet for at least a few months.

Yes, Thomas Edison was awarded thousands of patents, but the man wasn’t trying to get human beings to safely land on the surface of another world sitting 33.8 million miles away, separated by a cold, eternal vacuum. Each of those 40 technologies is a hell of a lot more complex than a light bulb.

Stephen Jurczyk, the associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, is the person in charge of making sure NASA’s engineers stay on task and get these technologies ready on time. He seems optimistic NASA can pull off a trip to Mars, but he says the agency just needs to remain flexible while moving forward. “This is a tremendous challenge, and we absolutely can do this,” he tells Inverse.

Continue reading “40 Technologies NASA is Inventing for Its Mars Missions” »

Robert Bigelow has joined the ranks of wealthy entrepreneurs with an expensive interest in space.

Meet the robot that could replace pilots one day.

Researchers from Kyoto University used signal patterns derived from a deep neural network to predict visual features from fMRI scans. This allowed their decoder to accurately identify objects.

The United States’ nuclear defense system succeeded in intercepting a missile.

The U.S.’ land-based ICBM arsenal will have to be replaced by the mid-2030s with a totally new missile. The land-based missiles remain a crucial component of the nuclear triad.

America’s land-based ICBM arsenal remains the backbone of its nuclear deterrence efforts, but it still needs a total replacement.

According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole could actually be a tunnel between universes, meaning our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is part of a larger universe. The theory explains that the matter doesn’t collapse into a single point, but rather gushes out a “white hole” at the other end of the black one.

The theory was published in the journal Physics Letters B, by Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski. In his article, he presents new mathematical models of the spiraling motion of matter falling into the black hole. His equations suggest that wormholes are probable alternatives to the “space-time singularities” originally predicted by Albert Einstein.

Einstein’s equations for general relativity suggest singularities are created whenever matter in a given region gets too dense as would happen at the center of a black hole. Singularities are infinitely dense and hot, and take up no space. This idea has been supported by indirect evidence but has never been fully accepted into the scientific community.

Continue reading “The ‘Door’ To Another Universe…Can We Find The Black Hole That Opens It…Physicists Say ‘Yes!’” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ePJGYNCvzqU

Astrophysicist Paul Sutter details how galaxies collide, merge, and rip each other apart.

The findings could help advance high-res imaging of viruses and bacteria.