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NASA said Orion is the safest spacecraft in the NASA fleet.

The technological advancements in imaging over the past 20 years are really paying off in space. From Hubble Space Telescope to James Webb, the Perseverance Mars Rover, and now NASA’s Orion spacecraft, a stream of amazing images from space parade before us.

Images are just the beginning

Continue reading “NASA’s Orion spacecraft gazes back at Earth and the Moon from distant orbit” »

The absence of the 21-centimeter hydrogen line allowed scientists to determine specific properties of the earliest galaxies in the universe.

An international group of astronomers, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, just shed new light on the cosmic dawn of the universe, a press statement reveals.

The cosmic dawn is a very early period of the universe, during which the first stars and galaxies formed. The researchers used data from India’s SARAS3 radio telescope to analyze this period of the cosmos and determine mass and energy output limits for the first stars and galaxies.

Today, Mars is colloquially known as the ‘Red Planet’ on account of how its dry, dusty landscape is rich in iron oxide (aka. ‘rust’). In addition, the atmosphere is extremely thin and cold, and no water can exist on the surface in any form other than ice.

But as the Martian landscape and other lines of evidence attest, Mars was once a very different place, with a warmer, denser atmosphere and flowing water on its surface.

For years, scientists have attempted to determine how long natural bodies existed on Mars and whether or not they were intermittent or persistent.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ui2NftuINZE

The rover is expected to be larger than the two China-operated rovers on the Moon earlier. Wu claimed that nuclear energy could also be used to power the hopper, a machine intended to lift off from the lunar surface numerous times and bounce in and out of a crater’s constantly shadowed section in search of water.

Nuclear energy will support the station’s communications facilities to maintain communication with Earth and power the station’s communications systems. It will also stay connected to the Earth and relay signals between the Earth, Mars, and deep space. China has also announced its desire to explore deep space.

Continue reading “China Could Set Up ‘Moon Base’ By 2028; Lunar Station Likely To Be Powered By Nuclear Energy” »

JAXA hopes second lost lander can be recovered for radiation experiments.

The merging of two neutron stars emits both light and gravitational waves at the same time, so if gravity and light have the same speed, they should be detected on Earth at the same time. Given the distance of the galaxy that housed these two neutron stars, we know that the two types of waves had traveled for about 130 million years and arrived within two seconds of one another.

So, that’s the answer. Gravity and light travel at the same speed, determined by a precise measurement. It validates Einstein once again, and it hints at something profound about the nature of space. Scientists hope one day to fully understand why these two very different phenomena have identical speeds.

The latest data improves our understanding of how clouds in “hot Jupiter” exoplanets like this might appear up close. They are likely to be broken up, rather than a single, uniform blanket over the planet.

Photochemistry is the result of light triggering chemical reactions. This process is fundamental to life on Earth: it makes ozone, for example, which protects us from harsh ultraviolet (UV) rays.

New observations of WASP-39 b, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star found 700 light years away, confirm the presence of a never-before-seen molecule in the atmosphere – sulfur dioxide – among other details.

Continue reading “Photochemistry is confirmed on an exoplanet” »

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Continue reading “The REAL Possibility of Mapping Alien Planets!” »

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(Credit: Coconino National Forest/Flickr)

While H3+ is astronomically abundant, no scientist understood the mechanisms that form it from organic molecules. Until now.