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Category: space – Page 204

Dracula’s Chivito: New Protoplanetary Disk discovered with Pan-STARRS

A protoplanetary disk is a disk of dense gas and dust, orbiting a newly formed star. It is assumed that planets are born by the gradual accumulation of material in such a structure, therefore discoveries and studies of protoplanetary disks are essential for improving our understanding of planetary formation processes.

Now, a team of astronomers led by Ciprian T. Berghea of the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) in Washington, DC, has discovered a new disk of this type that is associated with an infrared source known as IRAS 23077+6707. The finding was made by inspecting the Pan-STARRS data while working on a variability study of active galactic nuclei (AGN) candidates.

Third Time’s a Charm — Lunar Library Successfully Lands on the Moon — Backup of Human Civilization Will Last for Up To Billions of Years

Could we disregard author rights for the sake of putting civ backup?

And put a lot more or at least more chosen pieces (but what to choose)?

We are thrilled to announce that on February 22, 2024, our third attempt to land the Arch Mission Foundation’s 30 million page Lunar Library on the Moon has succeeded!

NASA Rover Spots Dead Mars Helicopter in Its “Final Resting Place”

NASA’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, has seen its last days of flight — but its friend, the Perseverance rover, hasn’t said goodbye just yet.

Originally published earlier this month by NASA, the grainy raw images of Ingenuity sitting sadly in the sand ripples of Mars’ Neretva Vallis river valley, cleaned up images of the little chopper that could were posted by German design student Simeon Schmauss on on X-formerly-Twitter and Flickr.

The enhanced displays, as Schmauss explained, were created when he pasted together six of the raw images, zoomed in on Ingenuity, and altered the image’s colors “to approximately match what the human eye would see.”

MIT engineers test an idea for a new hovering rover

Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

Because they lack an atmosphere, the moon and other airless bodies such as asteroids can build up an electric field through direct exposure to the sun and surrounding plasma. On the moon, this surface charge is strong enough to levitate dust more than 1 meter above the ground, much the way static electricity can cause a person’s hair to stand on end.

Engineers at NASA and elsewhere have recently proposed harnessing this natural surface charge to levitate a glider with wings made of Mylar, a material that naturally holds the same charge as surfaces on airless bodies. They reasoned that the similarly charged surfaces should repel each other, with a force that lofts the glider off the ground. But such a design would likely be limited to small asteroids, as larger planetary bodies would have a stronger, counteracting gravitational pull.

The MIT team’s levitating rover could potentially get around this size limitation. The concept, which resembles a retro-style, disc-shaped flying saucer, uses tiny ion beams to both charge up the vehicle and boost the surface’s natural charge. The overall effect is designed to generate a relatively large repulsive force between the vehicle and the ground, in a way that requires very little power. In an initial feasibility study, the researchers show that such an ion boost should be strong enough to levitate a small, 2-pound vehicle on the moon and large asteroids like Psyche.