Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 164

SpaceX briefly assembled the newest prototype of Starship on August 6 and has broken the world record for the tallest rocket ever.

SpaceX engineers at the SpaceX Starbase facility located in Texas connected Starship SN20 to its Super Heavy booster for around an hour while checks to the fitting were made. Starship alone is 165 feet tall, and Super Heavy is 230 feet, together Starship and Super Heavy brought the total height to 395 feet, breaking the previous record set by NASA's Saturn V moon rocket that was 363 feet standing.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk celebrated the Starship being briefly assembled on Twitter, saying, "Dream come true". While Starship can be assembled, that doesn't mean it's completely ready, as Musk writes on Twitter that there are at least "4 significant items" it needs before it's ready for launch. Those "4 significant items" are heat shields to protect it from Earth's atmosphere, thermal protection for Super Heavy's 33 raptor engines, "ground system propellant storage tanks and a quick disconnect arm", according to Space.com.

Perseverance, NASA's newest Mars rover that landed on Mars in February this year, is about to begin its quest for finding evidence of alien life.

Perseverance has been observing the martian planes for many months now and has found its home in the Jezero Crater, where it will now begin drilling into the Red Planet's surface to collect rock samples that researchers back on Earth will inspect. Perseverance will collect rock samples, examine them, relay any data back to NASA and pass on the samples when they are picked up to be returned to Earth.

NASA believes that the Jezero Crater contained a large lake around 3.5 billion years ago, which could be conditions that supported life, hence Perseverance being stationed there. The Mars rover will drill a hole into the surface that will take about 11 days to complete and search for any signs of microbial life in the deep lake bed. NASA is expecting to collect around 30 martian samples and return them to Earth in the 2030s. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

NASA is showcasing some of the best achievements of its Hubble Space Telescope, and one image, in particular, contains 10,000 galaxies.

NASA is celebrating #DeepFieldWeek and has decided to take viewers for a trip down memory lane with some incredible images Hubble snapped, with the first being the original Hubble Deep Field. The tweets from the Hubble Twitter account continue, and with each new image, NASA explains which instrument was used and how many galaxies are contained within the image.

One image that is worth highlighting is from 2003 and 2004, where Hubble captured a million-second-long exposure to "create the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, which contains about 10,000 galaxies!". In 2019, Hubble Legacy Field released and contained within it is data representing 16 years of the telescope's observations and "265,000 galaxies, and 13.3 billion years - making it the largest collection of galaxies documented by Hubble."

Scientists have poured years and years of time ironing out all of the details of launching the Hubble Space Telescopes successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The telescope has been under construction for many years now and has been cursed with numerous delays for various different reasons. Billions and billions of dollars have been poured into the telescope that is poised to unlock secrets of the universe for us, and now engineers, scientists, and NASA are approaching the end of the development runway and are almost ready for launch.

All of the years of work, money, and time developing JWST could all end in a matter of seconds if the launch on the Ariane 5 rocket fails. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science missions at NASA, summed all of the risks JWST will endure from the moment it's about to launch to when it is successfully deployed and operational. Zurbuchen wrote, "Those who are not worried or even terrified about this are not understanding what we are trying to do."

Researchers have recently got their hands-on a long-lost fragment of Stonehenge that was taken from one of the pillars back in 1958.

Robert Phillips represented a drilling company back in 1958 that was restoring Stonehenge. While restoring the monuments, Phillips snagged a cylindrical core from of the pillars, Stone 58, and in the years later emigrated to the United States. Now, it's illegal to drill into the stones, but researchers in 2018 got a hold of Phillips cylindrical stone core sample and began to study it. Their findings have recently been published in the journal PLOS One on August 4.

Researchers put the core sample through many different scans and found that stone was 99.7% quartz, described as "quartz cement" and "an interlocking mosaic of crystals". On top of that, the researchers found that some of the sandy sediments contained in the sample dated back Paleogene period, 66 million to 23 million years ago.

A new study has explored the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a crucial circulation system that transports salty water from the tropics north and cold water southward.

Led author of the study, Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research located in Germany, said the AMOC is "one of our planet's key circulation systems", and according to the findings from the study, the AMOC is on the verge of collapsing, which would have major impacts around the world. The authors warn that if the AMOC halts, Europe and North America could begin to experience extremely cold weather, as well as parts of the US East Coast could see a rise in sea levels.

Boers goes on to explain that the results of the study indicate that the AMOC is approaching what is described as a "critical threshold", "beyond which the circulation system could collapse." The led author recognizes that the study's method doesn't provide a time for when the AMOC will collapse. However, Boers states that it provides enough evidence that the AMOC has lost its stability, "which I take as a warning that we might be closer to an AMOC tipping than we think", says Boers.

Astronomers believe they have located a planet that is showing promising signs of having an atmosphere that can support life.

A new study published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal has honed in on a planetary system dubbed L 98-59 after the star it orbits. The system contains a rocky planet that has half the mass of Venus and is believed to be an ocean world. The team of astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, and found evidence of a fifth planet in what is called the "habitable zone" of its local star.

The "habitable zone" is a location in space that is not too hot and not too cold to host life. While the results from the study are definitely significant, astronomers don't have the telescope resolution to be able to detect biosignatures on the planet, even though it's only 35 light-years away, which is quite a small distance when discussing distances in space.

Since being denied by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Blue Origin has been posting infographics that payout Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The beef between the two companies and NASA begun when NASA awarded SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract for SpaceX to construct a lunar lander and a transportation method to the moon. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin officially protested NASA's decisions, and after reviewing the protest, the GAO denied Blue Origin's request, which prompted SpaceX to continue working on its design.

Since these events transpired, Blue Origin has taken its emotions about the situation public with infographics comparing its own design to SpaceX's. Laura Seward Forczyk, the founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, spoke to Inverse about Blue Origin's argument in the most recent infographic seen below. She said, "it was quite the argument to make when Blue Origin has not yet launched anything to space", referencing how SpaceX has successfully transported astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station.

A tablet that dates back some 3700 years has been found to be the oldest example of applied geometry in the history of mathematics.

Australian mathematician Dr. Daniel Mansfield from UNSW Science's School of Mathematics and Statistics revealed the oldest known origins of applied geometry on a 3700-year-old clay tablet named Plimpton 322 that dates back to the Old Babylonian period between 1900 to 1600 BCE. According to a new study released on August 4 in Foundations of Science, the clay tablet was used to survey the land with "Pythagorean triples", which are used to make accurate right angles.

Dr. Mansfield says, "The discovery and analysis of the tablet have important implications for the history of mathematics. For instance, this is over a thousand years before Pythagoras was born." Dr. Mansfield added that "It is generally accepted that trigonometry-the branch of maths that is concerned with the study of triangles-was developed by the ancient Greeks studying the night sky in the second century BCE. But the Babylonians developed their own alternative 'proto-trigonometry' to solve problems related to measuring the ground, not the sky."

Blue Origin has posted a new info-graphic to its website that states that SpaceX's method of transporting NASA astronauts back to the moon is "immensely complex & high risk".

The Jeff Bezos-founded space exploration company, protested NASA's decision to award SpaceX with a $2.9 billion contract to construct the next lunar lander and transportation system to put NASA astronauts back on the moon. Blue Origin officially protested NASA's decision, and NASA told SpaceX to halt any construction until the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a decision, which they gave on Monday.

The GAO said, "NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award," which was Blue Origin's entire defense in protesting the initial decision. Since then, Bezos' Blue Origin has been slinging criticisms out at NASA and SpaceX for being denied the opportunity to construct their own method, and the recent info-graphic that was discovered on its website is another example of how the company is expressing itself about the decision made.

Over the many years, humans have been exploring what is in and around our solar system. We have sent many spacecrafts out to relay data back to us that has been used to piece together a better idea of our home.

Researchers know that Earth is the third planet furthest from the sun, and they know that Earth is the sixth planet from the edge of the solar system, or more accurately referred to as the outer heliosphere. The solar system's edge is defined by locating the region of space where the sun's charged solar particles are "deflected" by interstellar radiation present in the vacant space behind the edge. This border is defined as the heliosphere.

Researchers used data from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) that NASA launched in 2008 to create a new 3D map that shows the size of the heliosphere in relation to the sun and our solar system. Below is an image, and as you can see, the sun is located in the middle. On the right-hand side of the image is Voyager 1 and 2, two satellites now in interstellar space where there is abundant interstellar radiation. To the left of the image is the heliosphere, and as you would have probably already noticed, the heliosphere isn't symmetrical. This is due to how the sun is moving throughout the Milky Way.

SpaceX will be conducting its first all-civilian mission with Crew Dragon soon, and the astronauts aboard will have a series made about them by Netflix.

Netflix has announced what is called "Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space", which is a new documentary series that Netflix confirmed is in production on August 3, 2021. The new documentary series is produced by Netflix and Time Studios and is directed by Jason Hehir, the director behind the Michael Jordan documentary series "The Last Dance".

Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Chris Sembroski, and Sian Proctor will be boarding SpaceX's dragon capsule for launch on September 15. Netflix is planning on releasing one episode for the show on September 6 and then another on September 13. The final will be released closer to the end of September. Deadline reports that the creation of Inspiration4 represents a business shift by Netflix into real-time documentary production.

Researchers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have documented the presence of a new class of fire known as "cool flames".

Peter Sunderland, a Professor of Fire Protection Engineering and Keystone Professor at the University of Maryland, said that this discovery could transform what we know fire can be and increase the possibilities of what it can do. Sunderland continued and said that the current goal of his research is to understand these "spherical cool diffusion flames" and eventually model how they work, which can lead to designing "a new class of clean combustion engine."

The new class of fire is known as "cool flames" due to how extremely low the temperature is and how hard the blue hue of the flame is to see. In 2012 "cool flames" were first discovered on the ISS, but only for a brief moment before all fuel was exhausted. This event sparked interest in "cool flames" due to how very little was known about them. To push the humans' envelope of understanding of fire even further, a team of researchers partnered with astronauts aboard the ISS to test different gas fuels.

Back in 2018, a team of astronomers and astrophysicists measured all of the light in the history of the observable universe.

Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at Clemson University, led the team that used NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to view all of the light within the observable universe bubble, which is estimated to be about 14 billion light-years in radius. This bubble represents how far researchers are able to see back in time to the beginning of the universe, and so far researchers know that the observable universe contains, "contains at least two trillion galaxies and a trillion trillion stars," writes Dennis Overbye in New York Times Science.

Ajello and his team analyzed all of the relevant data acquired by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and found, "From data collected by the Fermi telescope, we were able to measure the entire amount of starlight ever emitted. This has never been done before. Most of this light is emitted by stars that live in galaxies. And, so, this has allowed us to better understand the stellar-evolution process and gain captivating insights into how the universe produced its luminous content", says Ajello.

Researchers have been able to link an oxygen event 250 million years ago to Earth's largest extinction event.

The largest extinction in Earth's history, where 96% of the planet's marine life and 70% of the land animals died, has been linked to an oxygen event. The largest extinction event to ever happen on Earth marked the ending of the Permian period 250 million years ago, and now according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience by researchers from Florida State University (FSU), a sudden rise and then a drop in the ocean's oxygen levels coincided with the mass extinction event.

Sean Newby, the lead author on the study and FSU graduate research assistant, said, "There's previous work that's been done that shows the environment becoming less oxygenated leading into the extinction event, but it has been hypothesized as a gradual change. We were surprised to see this really rapid oxygenation event coinciding with the start of the extinction and then a return to reducing conditions."

Last week the Russian module Nauka arrived at the International Space Station, but after it docked with the floating laboratory, it knocked it off normal orbit path.

When Nauka arrived at the ISS, it began the docking process, but its thrusters continued to fire after it had docked, which resulted in the entire station being pushed off course. Initially, NASA said that the incident caused the ISS to be pushed "45 degrees out of attitude" and that the crew was completely safe.

However, Zebulon Scoville, the Nasa flight director who was leading mission control during the incident, told The New York Times that the space station actually "spun one-and-a-half revolutions - about 540 degrees - before coming to a stop upside down". Scoville added that the ISS then did a forward flip to get itself back into its original orientation. On top of that, Scoville said that he was forced into declaring his very first "spacecraft emergency" due to the incident.

A new interactive tool has been published online that allows you to see where your house would be when dinosaurs walked the Earth millions of years ago.

The tool has been created by California paleontologist Ian Webster who spoke to CNN and said that the map shows "that our environment is dynamic and can change". For those that don't know, the seven continents that we know of today weren't always separated as they are now. Around 240 million years ago, all of the continents were together and formed one large landmass called Pangea.

As time went on, Pangea broke apart to form the continents we know today. According to Webster, "The history of Earth is longer than we can conceive, and the current arrangement of plate tectonics and continents is an accident of time. It will be very different in the future, and Earth may outlast us all." The interactive map Webster created allows users to enter their home addresses to see where their location would be up to 750 million years ago. Check out the tool here.

A landmass that once connected Britain to the continent of Europe has been pieced together by a team of archaeologists.

The landmass that was swallowed by a tsunami more than 8,200 years ago is called Doggerland, and now a team of archaeologists inspecting the area along the Dutch coastline has gathered enough data to piece together what Doggerland looked it.

According to a report from The Guardian, more than 200 objects from Doggerland were discovered by archaeologists, and those objects included things such as a deer bone that had an arrowhead embedded in it, fossils, mammoth molars, and a skull fragment from a young Neanderthal.

Astronomers find peculiar-looking things in the cosmos all the time, even to the point where a collection of the most strange wonders of the cosmos is compiled into a book for viewing pleasure.

The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies is a catalog by Halton Arp, and it's comprised of a collection of all of the strangest galaxies found. The Atlas was assembled in the early 1960s, and since then, astronomers have been finding more and more of these weird and wonderful galaxies. Our window to the universe, or more commonly named the Hubble Space Telescope, has been snapping images of these galaxies for the past 31 years.

Above is an image that was taken by Hubble, and it's of the galaxy Arp 195. As you can see, the galaxy is all warped and distorted, but why? Arp 195 is caught, literally, in a cosmic game of gravitational tug-of-war. Arp 195 isn't a single galaxy - it's actually a trio of galaxies all slowly colliding with each other. This slow collision and the gravity from each of the galaxies is causing what would be normal-looking spiral galaxies to become distorted.

A national park in Alaska has posted a very cool video of a "flying saucer" hovering above the water in a picturesque landscape.

The video was posted to the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve Facebook page, and if you are already jumping to conclusions about it beings aliens or extraterrestrial origin, you would be wrong as this "sighting" can be easily explained. The Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve Facebook page post explains that what is caught on video here is called Fata Morgana, an optical illusion that is seen within a narrow band on Earth's horizon.

The Facebook page explains, "Islands in glacier bay turn to UFOs or the flying Dutchman with a little imagination and a pinch of cool science! When air of different densities meet, the air in Earth's atmosphere acts as a refracting lens, creating the mirage effect we see. Cool, calm air often forms at the water's surface- then, if warm dense air pushes down on the cool air at the surface, a lens is created. This phenomenon occurred on a warm day (70F+) in Glacier Bay, but is not exclusive to summer months."