Seismicity on Mars full of surprises, in first continuous year of data
Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:43
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The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far.
At the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Savas Ceylan of ETH Zurich discussed some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that dete Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost
Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:43 Write a comment
The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth's nearest neig Space Launch System Core Stage heads to Kennedy Space Center
Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:43 Write a comment
The first core stage of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket departs Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, following completion of the Green Run series of tests of its design and systems. The stage now is in route to the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its final stop prior to NASA's launch of the Artemis I mission around the Moon.
At Kennedy, the core stage wil A breakthrough astrophysics code rapidly models stellar collisions
Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:43 Write a comment
A breakthrough astrophysics code, named Octo-Tiger, simulates the evolution of self-gravitating and rotating systems of arbitrary geometry using adaptive mesh refinement and a new method to parallelize the code to achieve superior speeds.
This new code to model stellar collisions is more expeditious than the established code used for numerical simulations. The research came from a unique c NAOC scientists make further step towards understanding dark energy
Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:43 Write a comment
The extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) collaboration has released its latest scientific results. These results include two studies on dark energy led by Prof. ZHAO Gongbo and Prof. WANG Yuting, respectively, from National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(NAOC).
The study led by Prof. Zhao was recently published in Monthly Notices of the Ro Recruiting in trying times: How Lockheed Martin Space hired thousands (plus 700 interns) in a pandemic
Saturday, 24 April 2021 11:12 Write a comment
Lockheed Martin Space hired 2,700 people plus 700 interns in 2020, a year unlike any other for human resources managers. Almost overnight, the prime contractor with about 23,000 employees switched from its traditional in-person approach to virtual recruitment, interviewing and training.
China names Mars rover for traditional fire god
Saturday, 24 April 2021 09:28 Write a comment
Old SpaceX capsule delivers new crew to space station
Saturday, 24 April 2021 09:21 Write a comment
A recycled SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday, the third high-flying taxi ride in less than a year for Elon Musk's company.
The Dragon capsule docked autonomously with the orbiting outpost more than 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the Indian Ocean, a day after launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
Alpha: Second Space Station mission for ESA’s Thomas Pesquet begins
Saturday, 24 April 2021 07:38 Write a comment
Today at 11:08 (CEST) the Crew Dragon spacecraft with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide docked with the International Space Station’s Node-2 Harmony module, marking the start of ESA’s six-month mission Alpha.
White House nominates NOAA administrator, NASA CFO
Friday, 23 April 2021 16:22 1 Comment
ORLANDO — The White House announced April 22 its intent to nominate an ocean scientist to be the next administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a Defense Department official to be NASA’s next chief financial officer.
Mission Alpha launch replay
Friday, 23 April 2021 15:30 Write a comment
Video:
02:33:30
The full replay of the ESA Web TV coverage of the liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide. The Crew-2 will spend around 24 hours travelling to the International Space Station. The rocket lifted off at 11:49 on 23 April 2021 from Launchpad 39A in Cape Canaveral at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.
Thomas is the first ESA astronaut to fly in space in a vehicle other than the Russian Soyuz or the US Space Shuttle,
Feeling confinement in the gut: Microbiome alterations common in astronauts
Friday, 23 April 2021 13:50 Write a comment
Crew members who took part in the Mars500 experiment showed significant changes in their gut microbiota from their 520 days in confinement, according to a new study by scientists at Université de Montreal and McGill University.
The study, published today in the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal and funded by the Canadian Space Agency, analyzed data from fecal samples of six crew members from Russia, Europe and China.
The crew lived in a completely sealed habitat in Moscow from June 2010 to November 2011 to simulate a manned mission to Mars, which international space agencies hope to make in the 2030s. Their confinement was the longest ever conducted with humans under controlled conditions.
The goal: to test the impact of living cut off from the world on the physiological and psychological health. In the end, all six crew members emerged with major alterations in their body mass, muscle strength and other indicators, previous studies have shown.
The discovery of microbiome alterations represents a missing link between these symptoms and deepens scientists' understanding of how well astronauts will be able to work in and recover from long-duration spaceflight, as well as how humans generally interact with their habitats.
Hubble captures giant star on the edge of destruction
Friday, 23 April 2021 13:40 Write a comment
The expanding shell of gas and dust that surrounds the star is about five light-years wide, which equals the distance from here to the nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri.
The huge structure was created from one or more giant eruptions about 10,000 years ago. The star's outer layers were blown into space—like a boiling teapot popping off its lid.
This supermoon has a twist – expect flooding, but a lunar cycle is masking effects of sea level rise
Friday, 23 April 2021 13:35 Write a comment
A "super full moon" is coming on April 27, 2021, and coastal cities like Miami know that means one thing: a heightened risk of tidal flooding.
Exceptionally high tides are common when the moon is closest to the Earth, known as perigee, and when it's either full or new.
How do you test a helicopter bound for Mars?
Friday, 23 April 2021 13:04 Write a comment
The Ingenuity helicopter may be the first vehicle ever to fly on Mars, but Mars was not the first place it has ever flown. Before packaging it up and blasting it to the Red Planet, engineers at JPL gave the helicopter a trial run in a special wind tunnel designed with help from researchers at Caltech.
To simulate flying on a planet where the atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth's, a custom wind tunnel was built inside of an 85-foot-tall, 25-foot-diameter vacuum chamber at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. Pressure in the chamber was pumped down to approximate the Martian atmosphere, while an array of 441 pairs of individually controllable fans blew on the helicopter to simulate forward flight in the enclosed space.
The fan array was designed and built by JPL engineers with input from Caltech's Chris Dougherty and Marcel Veismann, who are currently Ph.D. students working with Mory Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering and Booth-Kresa Leadership Chair of Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST). Dougherty and Veismann had previously overseen design and assemblage of a similar array of 1,296 pairs of fans for the Real Weather Wind Tunnel at CAST, which opened in 2017.