Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 424

Americans are currently celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 space launch, and what better way to experience it all over again then with an interactive website that shows you the entire thing.

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch that occurred on Wed Jul 16th, 1969 a website has been developed and dedicated to re-living the whole experience. Users can go to this website here which has been sourced entirely of historical material.

Heading over to the website we can see that it can filtered by 'mission milestones', as well as the transcript has been provided and updates in real-time as the launch progresses. There is also images on the right-hand side of the site, each of the images are from the official launch taken by NASA and the astronauts themselves.

Perhaps the future of human health benefits will come in the form of tiny robots that assist your health problems from the inside your body.

The above video has been released onto the official Georgia Tech YouTube Channel and showcases what is has been called a "bristle-bot". The bot is only 2mm (about 0.08in) in length, weighs 5mg and can move at about 8mm per second. Not only are the bots, small fast and diversable, but they are made out of lead ziconate titante and have the ability to turn voltage into vibration for movement.

Georgia Tech has developed these bots but at the moment they wouldn't be much benefit to health insitutes as they can only move in one director and can't carry a payload. The end goal of these bots is eventually equipping them with the ability to jump and swim. Once these goals are completed and implemented, we could see these bots being adopted to combat health problems and fix people from inside their bodies out.

Humans are continuously attempting to map the stars and gain a better understanding of the planets we have in our solar system. One of those planets that are in our understanding slow cooker is our very own red planet, Mars.

Scientists are hell-bent on attempting to figure out if Mars was home to its very own version of life and now a recent discovery coming out MSL Curiosity regarding a specific Mars landmark and how it could of potentially been the spot life developed. MSL Curiosity is Mars Space Laboratory, a space probe mission with a goal of discovering more about Mars and if life was ever at home on the planet.

Christopher House is a Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, he is involved within NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission and in a press release from Penn State University he talked about the discoveries made in Mars' Gale Crater. "Gale Crater appears to have been a lake environment. The water would have persisted for a million years or more." The team managed to locate a mudstone in the crater and also find that "the whole system, including the groundwater that ran through it, lasted much longer, perhaps even a billion or more years."

As America and NASA come closer to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Moon landing, NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine shined a light on what the next space-program will be.

Bridenstine was on Face The Nation and was iasked about how NASA plans on getting to the Moon within the next 5 years. According to Bridenstine, "There's two risks. There's technical risk and there's political risk. We would be on the moon right now if it weren't for the political risk. We would be on Mars, quite frankly, by now had it not been for the political risk." Combining into the 'political risk' is the other half the equation which is funding, which Bridenstine also says that was a massive issue.

Since the announcement by the Vice President for a Moon mission in the next 5 years, NASA has recently received the funding necessary to make this mission possible. Donald Trump recently said on Twitter that the Moon mission should not be focused on, and rather that Mars should be America's next goal.

The human race has made another milestone in the quantum entanglement field where they have managed to teleport an electron to a low-orbiting satellite 300 miles away.

According to a team of researchers in China, scientists have managed to use quantum entanglement to teleport an electron 300 miles away. An MIT Technology Review said that this is the furthest the technology has managed to teleport an object, the scientists findings have been published in a paper online at arXiv.

This isn't the first test of its kind, for about a month these scientists have conducted many tests and have beamed up millions of photons from their ground site located in Tibet. The team said that "This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum Internet."

The global understanding of how the universe works could get another injection of information after a new Russian space probe conducts its 6.5 year survey of the cosmos once it reaches its destination.

Russia partnered with Germany has successfully launched a new space probe telescope called Spektr-RG, and after its 100 day journey to Lagrange Point 2 it will be surveying the surrounding galaxies. Spektr-RG will be surveying for 6.5 year survey that is expected to gather information on 100,000 galaxies clusters, hundreds of thousands of active stars and 3 million supermassive black holes.

With this new information that will be recovered, its believed that the human race as a whole will be given a better understanding of how the universe is mapped. Not only will this new map be great, scientist also expect to gain a better understanding of how black holes form and the distribution of matter is throughout the universe. Dark energy is also on the list of theories that should gain some level of information.

NASA has partnered up with Made In Space to demonstrate a new spacecraft that will 3D print spacecraft components in Earth's lower-orbit.

Made In Space and NASA will soon be bringing Archinaut One to lower-earths orbit when the launch of the Rocket Lab Electron rocket takes to the skies from New Zealand in 2022. The spacecraft will be "positioned in low-Earth orbit, the spacecraft will 3D-print two beams that extend 32 feet (10 meters) out from each side of the spacecraft." The craft will be equipped with solar panels that will generate five times more power than normal solar panles the same size spacecraft. These solar panels will act as energy sources for when the craft is manufacturing.

Here is the official description: "Once it's positioned in low-Earth orbit, the spacecraft will 3D-print two beams that extend 32 feet (10 meters) out from each side of the spacecraft. As manufacturing progresses, each beam will unfurl two solar arrays that generate up to five times more power than traditional solar panels on spacecraft of similar size. The in-space technology demonstration marks the start of the second phase of a partnership established through NASA's Tipping Point solicitation."

There is many black holes throughout the observable universe, and as humans attempt to try and discover physics behind these strange matter eating giants we are constantly thrown off track by new information. Today is one of those days.

NASA has been using its Hubble Telescope which is designed to view deep into space at objects that are many, many light years away, such as black holes. At the heart of the NGC 3147 galaxy, which is 130 million light years away, the Hubble Telescope spotted a black hole that was acting differently than expected. Supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies are matter swallower's, as their huge mass has been pulled into an infinitely small space, where their gravitational pull becomes infinite and space-time curves inwards infinitely.

Keeping this in mind, active galaxies feed these supermassive black holes which are at the center of galaxies. Black holes having such a large gravitational pulls usually produce a ring of space debris that circle the hole until it is swallowed. Galaxies that are less active and have smaller black holes don't have the gravitational pull to produce these material rings. The black hole that is in NGC 3147 shouldn't be one of those producing a ring, as scientists assumed the hole was starving. That wasn't what the Hubble revealed though.

The billionaire founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, just unveiled a new giant lunar landing vehicle that was created by Blue Origin, his own rocket company. The new lander is called Blue Moon and comes in varying sizes and will take different payloads to the moon.

Blue Moon is the first step in what would turn into what Blue Origin calls a "sustained human presence" on the moon. Bezos said at the event: "This is an incredible vehicle, and it's going to the moon". The comapny has received multiple grants from NASA adding up into the millions in its mission to create critical lunar lander systems.

Bezos unveiled its new Blue Moon landers that have been designed to carry robotic and infrastructure payloads to the moon, with payloads weighing up to 7 tons (6.5 metric tonnes). The larger variant will, in Blue Moon's words, return Americans to the moon by 2024. Blue Moon explains: "the larger variant of Blue Moon has been designed to land an ascent vehicle that will allow us to return Americans to the moon by 2024".

NASA has announced that SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is set to deliver supplies to the International Space Station today, the craft will bring science supplies and hardware.

NASA has shared the news to its official Twitter account saying that Dragon will be leaving earth and will rendezvous with the Space Station starting on 5:30am ET. The launch will be live-streamed and will be the expected arrival time is 7:30 a.m. Back in early March we learned that the mission would carry 400 pounds of supplies and equipment and that eventually SpaceX will be looking to send astronauts and not just cargo to the International Space Station.

If you are interested in checking out the successful splashdown of the Crew Dragon back in early March visit that footage here. If you want to keep on top of what NASA is doing you can visit the official NASA website here.