Lifeboat Foundation

After just over 10 and a half days in space, Peregrine Mission One, which was hosted by the private space company, Astrobotic Technology, burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean on January 18, 2024, at approximately 4:04 pm EST (1:04 pm EST). This concluded what is being deemed as a mostly successful mission for the first commercial mission for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, although the spacecraft was unable to land on the lunar surface due to a fuel leak that occurred about seven hours after launch on January 8, 2024. Despite this, Peregrine was able to test several of its onboard instruments during the short mission, which will provide valuable data for future missions to the Moon, specifically for NASA’s Artemis program.

Had Peregrine landed on the Moon, it would have marked the first time a US-built spacecraft would have landed on the lunar surface since NASA’s Apollo 17 in 1972. Despite this, four of the five instruments on Peregrine successfully collected data during the 10-day mission: Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS), Near-Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System (NIRVSS), Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS), Peregrine Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer (PITMS), with the fifth instrument, NASA’s Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA), designed to only be used on the lunar surface.

“Astrobotic’s Peregrine mission provided an invaluable opportunity to test our science and instruments in space, optimizing our process for collecting data and providing a benchmark for future missions,” said Dr. Nicola Fox, who is the associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “The data collected in flight sets the stage for understanding how some of our instruments may behave in the harsh environment of space when some of the duplicates fly on future CLPS flights.”

Astronauts aboard the ISS have shared dramatic imagery of the Axiom-3 Crew Dragon as it approached the station on Saturday.

A small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere Sunday morning and lit up the sky over eastern Germany. Videos of the incident have gone viral on social media, depicting a glowing object descending over Europe. Experts later confirmed that the light came from a disintegrating meteorite.

According to astronomers and observers, the 2024 BX1 asteroid, which was temporarily designated as Sar2736, landed outside Berlin near Nennhausen at around 1:30 am local time. Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky was the first one to discover the approaching asteroid several hours before its impact, according to The International Astronomical Union.

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Cornell Univ scientists reptdly have created metallic form of gas Xenon by subjecting it to unprecedented pressure; success heightens hopes that metallic hydrogen, hypothetical substance that would have enoumous practical utility, may soon be within reach; NASA sponsored work of team headed by Dr Arthur L Ruoff; Ruoff comments on process (S)

Scientists hoped that capturing a time-lapse from Mars could reveal cloud or dust devil activity, leading to insights about the weather on the planet. The images were taken while the rover was parked on Nov. 8, 2023, just over 4,000 sols – Martian days – into the mission.

Though the images did not reveal any weather anomalies, scientists did get a detailed look at the planet’s surface.

Astronomers have proposed a new way to solve the so-called “Hubble tension,” but the approach ultimately raises more questions than it answers.

By way of background, cosmologists are in a bit of a crisis these days. One of the most important numbers they can measure is the so-called Hubble constant, the rate of expansion of the present-day universe. At their disposal cosmologists have two sets of tools to measure this number. On one side are tools that probe the relatively nearby universe, like measuring the brightnesses of a certain kind of exploding star known as Type 1a supernovae. These supernovae all erupt with the same absolute brightness, so by measuring their observed magnitudes, astronomers can calculate their distances, and then use that to estimate how quickly the universe is expanding.

The downside of this approach is that supernovae don’t always explode with exactly the same brightness, and for the kind of precision measurements astronomers are aiming for, they have to include assumptions and modeling of supernovae, which can potentially introduce inaccuracies.

I’ve been diving into this cool concept called gravitational time dilation, and it’s like this mind-bending thing predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. This concept highlights the actual difference in elapsed time between events observed by individuals situated at varying distances from a massive gravitational source.

If you’re hanging out close to a massive gravitational source, like a planet or star, time slows down for you. It’s like a cosmic slow-motion effect. But if you move away from it, time speeds up. This has been proven in experiments with atomic clocks placed at different heights — the closer to the Earth’s surface, the slower the clock ticks compared to those higher up.

Einstein first talked about this in 1907 when he was figuring out special relativity in speedy frames of reference. In general relativity, it’s like time is doing a dance based on where you are in space, as described by this thing called a metric tensor.

Natasha and Max also appear in a recent video titled “Transhumanism. What it is not” in conversation with David Wood and two representatives of the anti-transhumanist camp, Alexander Thomas and Émile Torres. I’m not familiar with the work of Thomas. I’m more familiar with the work of Torres. I very strongly disagree with most of what Torres says, but I must concede that Torres seems an intelligent and perceptive person, not without a certain endearing grace. However, BS is BS.

I’ve watched and listened again to the awesome conversation between Lex Fridman and Guillaume Verdon aka Beff Jezos, the founder of the movement called effective accelerationism (e/acc) and the company Extropic AI. This long conversation (almost 3 hours) touches a lot of things including physics, quantum, thermodynamics, Artificial Intelligence, LLMs, space, e/acc philosophy & metaphysics, and of course the meaning of life & all that. This is the most complete talk on e/acc so far and is likely to remain so for some time. Watch it all, and let’s accelerate the fuck away from mediocrity toward unlimited extropian and cosmist greatness.

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Today, the star-formation rate across the Universe is a mere trickle: just 3% of what it was at its peak. Here’s what it was like back then.