NASA has advanced plans for a 500-kilowatt (kW) lunar nuclear reactor to power astronauts, Moon bases and deep space missions by 2030.
Category: space
Bennu asteroid reveals new origins for life’s amino acids
“Our results flip the script on how we have typically thought amino acids formed in asteroids,” said Dr. Allison Baczynski.
Did the ingredients for life as we know it exist in the early solar system? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated new evidence for how amino acids, the known building blocks of life, ended up in the asteroid Bennu, which is estimated to have formed during the early days of the solar system billions of years ago. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the early solar system, how life might have formed on Earth, and potentially elsewhere.
For the study, the researchers analyzed samples of asteroid Bennu that were retrieved and returned to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in September 2023. The goal of the study was to ascertain the origins of the amino acids that had previously been identified in Bennu samples, which could help scientists gain insights into the origins of life in the early solar system. To accomplish this, the researchers used novel methods for measuring the amount of amino acids while comparing these findings to the carbonaceous meteorite Murchison.
In the end, the researchers discovered that glycine, one of the simplest amino acid molecules, with Bennu was formed in early ices in the early solar system while the glycine found in Murchison was formed in a protoplanetary body, which formed later in the history of the solar system. Additionally, the researchers found that certain aspects of the protein-building amino acid, glutamic acid, found in the Bennu samples, experienced significant changes during its formation and evolution.
Hubble uncovers the secret of blue straggler stars that defy aging
Some stars appear to defy time itself. Nestled within ancient star clusters, they shine bluer and brighter than their neighbors, looking far younger than their true age. Known as blue straggler stars, these stellar oddities have puzzled astronomers for more than 70 years. Now, new results using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope are finally revealing how these “forever young” stars come to be and why they thrive in quieter cosmic neighborhoods.
Why blue stragglers puzzle astronomers Blue straggler stars stand out in old star clusters because they appear hotter, more massive and younger than stars that should all have formed billions of years ago. Their very existence contradicts standard theories of stellar aging, prompting decades of debate over whether they are created through violent stellar collisions or through more subtle interactions between pairs of stars.
A new study provides some of the clearest evidence yet that blue stragglers owe their youthful appearance not to collisions, but to life in close stellar partnerships, and to the environments that allow those partnerships to survive. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.
It’s Official: Astronomers Detect Complex Sulfur Molecule in Interstellar Space
In the heart of our galaxy, scientists have discovered the largest sulfur-bearing molecule ever detected beyond Earth, with significant implications for the study of the cosmic origins of life.
The chemical is known as thiepine, or 2,5-cyclohexadiene-1-thione (C₆H₆S), a ring-shaped sulfur-bearing hydrocarbon produced in biochemical reactions.
When examining the molecular cloud G+0.693–0.027, a star-forming region about 27,000 light-years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way, astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and the CSIC-INTA Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) detected this complex molecule in space for the first time.
Why Musk Switched to Moon First Mars Later
There may be more to Musk’s decision to decide to build a city on the moon before building one on Mars than he’s telling us. Watch to find out.
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A long-lost Soviet spacecraft: AI could finally solve the mystery of Luna 9’s landing site
Using an advanced machine-learning algorithm, researchers in the UK and Japan have identified several promising candidate locations for the long-lost landing site of the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft. Publishing their results in npj Space Exploration, the team, led by Lewis Pinault at University College London, hope that their model’s predictions could soon be tested using new observations from India’s Chandrayaan-2 orbiter.
In 1966, the USSR’s Luna 9 mission became the first human-made object to land safely on the moon’s surface and to transmit photographs from another celestial body. Compared with modern missions, the landing was dramatic: shortly before the main spacecraft itself struck the lunar surface, it deployed a 58-cm-wide, roughly 100-kg spherical landing capsule from above, then maneuvered away to crash at a safe distance.
Equipped with inflatable shock absorbers, the capsule bounced several times before coming to rest, stabilizing itself by unfurling four petal-like panels. Although Luna 9 operated for just three days, it transmitted a wealth of valuable data back to Earth, helping to inspire confidence in crewed space exploration, that would see humanity take its first steps on the moon just three years later.
Third exoplanet detected in the planetary system HD 176986
Using HARPS and HARPS-N spectrographs, astronomers have observed a nearby K-type star designated HD 176986, known to host two super-Earth exoplanets. The observations resulted in the discovery of another planet in the system at least several times more massive than Earth. The finding was detailed in a paper published January 28 in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.
Could electronic beams in the ionosphere remove space junk?
A possible alternative to active debris removal (ADR) by laser is ablative propulsion by a remotely transmitted electron beam (e-beam). The e-beam ablation has been widely used in industries, and it might provide higher overall energy efficiency of an ADR system and a higher momentum-coupling coefficient than laser ablation. However, transmitting an e-beam efficiently through the ionosphere plasma over a long distance (10 m–100 km) and focusing it to enhance its intensity above the ablation threshold of debris materials are new technical challenges that require novel methods of external actions to support the beam transmission.
Therefore, Osaka Metropolitan University researchers conducted a preliminary study of the relevant challenges, divergence, and instabilities of an e-beam in an ionospheric atmosphere, and identified them quantitatively through numerical simulations. Particle-in-cell simulations were performed systematically to clarify the divergence and the instability of an e-beam in an ionospheric plasma.
The major phenomena, divergence and instability, depended on the densities of the e-beam and the atmosphere. The e-beam density was set slightly different from the density of ionospheric plasma in the range from 1010 to 1012 m−3. The e-beam velocity was changed from 106 to 108 m/s, in a nonrelativistic range.
