Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceXs brand-new Dragon spacecraft – named “Freedom” by the Crew-4 astronauts – arrived at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on April 16, 2022, after making the journey from SpaceX’s processing facility at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. After Dragon is mated to the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the launch vehicle will roll out to the pad and be raised to the vertical launch position.

Liftoff is scheduled for 5:26 a.m. EDT on Saturday, April 23. NASA’s Crew-4 mission is the fourth crew rotation flight on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket. NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Bob Hines will serve as mission commander and pilot, respectively, and NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, will join as mission specialists.

The latest update on the James Webb Space Telescope literally sent a shiver down my spine! The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) has now reached its operating temperature of a chilly 7 kelvins (7 deg above absolute 0, or-266 degrees C,-447 degrees F).

MIRI has now been turned on and is undergoing initial checkouts.

This frigid temp is colder than JWST’s other three instruments need to be, since MIRI detects longer infrared wavelengths than the rest of the instruments. But still, all the instruments need to reach extremely low temperatures — less than 40 K (−223 degrees Celsius,-369.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Images of C/2014 UN271 – a comet 128km in diameter and completing an orbit of the sun every few million years – were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Research by scientists in the United States, Canada, and China has proved that Mercury has geomagnetic storms similar to those on Earth. But do they produce aurora displays like on Earth?

Highly energetic particles called muons are ever present in the atmosphere and pass through even massive objects with ease. Sensitive detectors installed along the Tokyo Bay tunnel measure muons passing through the sea above them. This allows for changes in the volume of water above the tunnel to be calculated. For the first time, this method was used to accurately detect a mild tsunami following a typhoon in 2021.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, approximately 100,000 muon particles will have passed through your body. But don’t worry, muons pass through ordinary matter harmlessly, and they can be extremely useful too. Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka from Muographix at the University of Tokyo has made his career out of exploring applications for muons. He’s used them to see inside volcanoes and even detect evidence of ancient earthquakes. Recently, Tanaka and his international team of researchers have turned their focus to meteorological phenomena, in particular, tsunamis.

In September 2021, a typhoon approached Japan from the south. As it neared the land it brought with it ocean swells, tsunamis. On this occasion these were quite mild, but throughout history, tsunamis have caused great damage to many coastal areas around Japan. As the huge swell moved into Tokyo Bay, something happened on a microscopic level that’s almost imperceptible. Atmospheric muon particles, generated by cosmic rays from deep space, were ever so slightly more scattered by the extra volume of water than they would be otherwise. This means the quantity of muons passing through Tokyo Bay varied as the ocean swelled.

Mathematics is the language of the universe: It is probable that every major scientific discovery has used mathematics in some form.

The parachute was jettisoned during the landing sequence so the Skycrane could lower the rover down to the surface on its wheels.

The UK-assembled instrument on Hubble’s successor reaches a decidedly chilly-267C in space.

The technology uses a centrifuge and high-spin rates to accelerate a payload to Mach 5 before a strap-on rocket fires to get to orbit.