This week, explore a mysterious burst of radio waves from space, meet a miraculous Galapagos tortoise, discover a fearsome dinosaur, learn what it takes to explore Venus, and more.
NASA’s Mars helicopter has run into a bit of trouble after 28 successful flights and well over an entire dusty Earth year into its mission on the Red Planet.
One of the four-pound rotorcraft’s navigation sensors has given out — an unfortunate new development, especially considering Martian winter is almost upon it. Extreme temperature swings could soon wreak havoc on the rest of the helicopter’s electronics.
But the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab says their plucky rotorcraft isn’t finished yet.
The probe will wait in space for a yet unknown, but very exciting, object to arrive.
Europe’s Comet Interceptor probe will lurk in space, waiting for a pristine interstellar comet to zoom by.
The agency will release a report on UAPs sometime next year after a nine-month investigation.
NASA will fund a “no more than $100,000 study” looking at what astrophysical data exists with unexplained origins led by astrophysicist David Spergel.
Scientists who study the cosmos have a favorite philosophy known as the “mediocrity principle,” which, in essence, suggests that there’s really nothing special about Earth, the sun or the Milky Way galaxy compared to the rest of the universe.
Now, new research from CU Boulder adds yet another piece of evidence to the case for mediocrity: Galaxies are, on average, at rest with respect to the early universe. Jeremy Darling, a CU Boulder astrophysics professor, recently published this new cosmological finding in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“What this research is telling us is that we have a funny motion, but that funny motion is consistent with everything we know about the universe —there’s nothing special going on here,” said Darling. “We’re not special as a galaxy or as observers.”
Did life begin on Earth, or did it come from space? Amino acids, peptides and proteins may have an off-world origin giving credence to panspermia.
Twenty amino acids discovered in the sample materials returned provide evidence to support the evolving panspermia hypothesis.
During my research, preparing my next presentations, i found this beautiful speech by Krafft Ehricke, in 1984, before he passed away.
Every single word is a precious teaching, a beautiful lecture on natural philosophy.
Astronomers have cast a wide net to collect treasures from deep space.
NASA used the telescope in an innovative way to capture a group of massive galaxies in the COSMOS field.
Researchers believe they’ve found the chemical process that gave rise to RNA, and not only is it remarkably simple, it could have happened on Mars, too.
India launches its first liquid-mirror telescope for astronomy, which is Asia’s largest and the only one of its kind operational in the world.
