On Thursday, Virgin Galactic’s Galactic 5 mission carried planetary scientist Alan Stern and researcher Kellie Gerardi to suborbital space for the first time.
Astronomers studying data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope discovered a new system of seven “scorching” planets orbiting a distant star that is bigger and hotter than the sun, the space agency said Thursday.
NASA described the newly found planets as “sweltering” and “bathed” in radiant heat emitted by the host star that was described as “sun-like.” That star is 10% larger and 5% “hotter than the sun,” NASA said, and there is more heat per area from that star than any planet in our solar system experiences.
All of the planets are larger than Earth, with the two inner planets just slightly larger and the other five planets even bigger, about twice the size of Earth. The inner planets are “probably rocky and may have thin atmospheres,” NASA said, while the five outer planets are expected to have thick atmospheres.
Plants are not just able to survive in low gravity such as on the Moon, two new papers suggest – they may prefer it, at least based on the only species to sprout.
When Chang’e 4 landed on the Moon in January 2019 it carried with it a payload that could dictate the future of space exploration: seeds of four plant species it sought to grow on the lunar surface. The germination of a single cotton seed attracted plenty of attention at the time, but there’s more to growth than just sprouting. If crops grown on the Moon are less productive or more fragile than those on Earth, it’s going to be a big problem.
It’s taken more than four years, but important results from the experiment have now been released and they suggest that for all the obstacles to establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars, growing food might not be one. Then again, it’s still very early days.
An interdisciplinary international research team has recently discovered that a massive anomaly deep within the Earth’s interior may be a remnant of the collision about 4.5 billion years ago that formed the moon.
This research offers important new insights not only into Earth’s internal structure but also its long-term evolution and the formation of the inner solar system.
The study, which relied on computational fluid dynamics methods pioneered by Prof. Deng Hongping of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was published as a featured cover in Nature on Nov. 2.
That’s a great step.
LOUISVILLE, Colorado—The first Dream Chaser spaceplane built to go into orbit is starting to look the part. Its foldable wings and fuselage are covered in custom-fitted ceramic tiles to shield the spacecraft’s composite structure from the scorching heat of atmospheric reentry as it flies back to Earth. It has its landing gear, and technicians buzz around the vehicle to add the finishing touches before it leaves the factory.
Inside the spacecraft, workers are installing the final ducts for the environmental control system, which will make the pressurized compartment within Dream Chaser livable for astronauts at the International Space Station. The Dream Chaser’s job, at least for now, is to ferry cargo to and from the research complex orbiting some 240 miles (385 kilometers) above Earth. It will launch on top of a conventional rocket, maneuver in space like a satellite, and then land on a runway.
Continue reading “After decades of dreams, a commercial spaceplane is almost ready to fly” »
The U.S. Space Force assigned 21 rocket launches to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, worth about $2.5 billion in total, the military branch told CNBC.
Space Force’s Space Systems Command on Tuesday announced the mission assignments, which represent the last round of orders under a multiyear program called National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2.
The final batch of assignments were split almost evenly, according to Col. Doug Pentecost, the deputy program executive officer of the Space Force’s Space Systems Command. ULA received 11 missions, valued at $1.3 billion, and SpaceX received 10 missions, valued at $1.23 billion.
A little more than two years have passed since the Lucy mission launched on an Atlas V rocket, ultimately bound for asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. After a gravity assist from Earth in 2022, the spacecraft has been making a beeline for an intermediate target, and now it is nearly there.
On Wednesday, the $1 billion mission is due to make its first asteroid flyby, coming to within 265 miles (425 km) of the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh. In a blog post, NASA says the encounter will take place at 12:54 pm ET (16:54 UTC).
About an hour before the encounter, the spacecraft will begin attempting to lock on to the small asteroid so that its instruments are oriented toward it. This will allow for the best possible position to take data from Dinkinesh as Lucy speeds by at 10,000 mph (4,470 meters per second).
This haunting formation is located 16,000 light-years from Earth.
Two powerful X-ray telescopes have joined forces to study an eerie-looking celestial entity referred to as the “cosmic hand.” NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) captured vivid and complex features of this haunting formation located 16,000 light-years from Earth.
As per the press release, the images revealed the skeletal-like structure of this ghostly hand-shaped formation in space, depicting its magnetic field patterns.
Continue reading “NASA’s X-ray telescopes expose the ‘bones’ of a haunting cosmic hand” »
To tackle the problem, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration followed an approach, proposed in 2001, that involves squeezing the noise ellipse differently at different frequencies. This frequency-dependent squeezing is realized by coupling the interferometer to a 300-m-long “filter” cavity. Through the cavity, the team could tailor the spectrum of the squeezed state, injecting amplitude squeezing in the low-frequency region and phase squeezing in the high-frequency region, says Victoria Xu, also of MIT LIGO Lab. “This [approach] allows us to reduce the limiting forms of quantum noise in each frequency band,” she says.
The frequency-dependent approach had previously been demonstrated in tabletop systems but implementing it to mitigate radiation-pressure noise in a full-scale gravitational-wave detector was a massive engineering challenge, Xu says. An important aspect was the minimization of optical losses due to imperfect optical components or to a mismatch of the light modes propagating in the various parts of the setup—the filter cavity, the squeezer, and the interferometer. “Any loss can be seen as a ‘port’ through which regular, nonsqueezed vacuum can enter,” Barsotti says.
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration tested frequency-dependent squeezing during the commissioning of the instrument upgrades for the fourth run, comparing detector noise spectra for no squeezing, frequency-independent squeezing, and frequency-dependent squeezing. Frequency-dependent squeezing yielded similar enhancements to frequency-independent squeezing at high frequencies while eliminating the degradation below 300 Hz due to radiation-pressure noise. The team estimated that the improved noise performance would increase the distance over which mergers can be detected by 15%–18%, corresponding to up to a 65% increase in the volume of the Universe that the LIGO interferometer will be able to probe. Quantum optics specialist Haixing Miao of Tsinghua University in China says this result demonstrates an exceptional ability to manipulate quantum states of light with optical cavities but also offers an impressive demonstration that quantum measurement theory applies to the kilometer scales of a gravitational-wave detector.
