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We dunno what’s more wild: This vid of Japan’s probe bouncing off an asteroid to collect a sample – or that the rock was sun-burnt
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I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers
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That was pretty much the system used in this book, except in the book the spaceship was FROM the alpha centauri system
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Explosion and fireball in the sky: Brazilian cities live day like an action movie.
Windows and gates shook during the night. Check out video
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Briny liquid may be more common on Mars than once thought, unlikely to support life as we know it
Liquid Martian brines may be more common than once thought, but they are unlikely to play host to anything that looks like life as we know it, a paper in Nature Astronomy has found.
So probably no Martian Sea-Monkeys.
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There’s a world out there with a hexagon vortex over its pole packed with hydrocarbon ice crystals. That planet is Saturn
The giant hexagon-shaped storm raging atop Saturn’s North Pole is made out of frozen hydrocarbon ice suspended in seven hazy layers stacked on top of one another, according to a study published in Nature Communications on Friday.
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I wish I could see the Starlink satellites…
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Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket’s tanks just disintegrated in Earth’s orbit
Russian rocket tanks used to launch a radio telescope have broken up into 65 chunks, littering Earth’s orbit with debris.
The tanks, dumped from the Fregat-SB upper stage of the Zenit-3SLBF rocket that took the Spektr-R radio telescope into orbit in 2011, disintegrated on Friday, Roscosmos said on Sunday. “According to reports, the destruction occurred on May 8, 2020 in the time interval 08:00 - 09:00 Moscow time over the Indian Ocean,” a statement reads.
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Meteorite’s tiny secrets reveal Solar System’s sodium-rich, alkaline liquid past – a clue to formation of life
Potentially helping to answer the question of how did we all get here, scientists have found evidence of ideal conditions for the formation of microbial life on Earth – sodium-rich, alkaline fluids present in the early Solar System.
And where did they find this evidence? In a meteorite formed billions of years ago in the system’s asteroid belt, and found on our planet in 2000. It turns out the rock contains mineral grains forged in a sodium-rich, alkaline liquid, conditions that, according to McMaster University in Canada, are “preferential for the synthesis of amino acids – the building blocks of life – opening the door for microbial life to form as early as 4.5 billion years ago.”
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Two weeks before the first US commercial crew launch, NASA spanks more cash on an autumn Soyuz seat
Great news, everyone (if you’re Russian): NASA is hedging its bets on Commercial Crew and SpaceX by spanking a few more million dollars on another Soyuz seat this autumn.
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Not only pushing the potential origin to 4.5 bya, but pushing the location possibly into the extraterrestrial arena. If true, that would a) make us all ET’s and b) make the likelihood of finding life elsewhere just short of a given. Lots of studying still to do, of course, but this is pretty exciting!
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Meet Morpheus, the AI that’ll show you how deep the universe’s rabbit hole goes: Code can detect, classify galaxies from 'scope scans
Morpheus employs a range of computer vision algorithms, including a neural network, that segments objects in the image from the empty background of space, and analyses each detected galaxy pixel-by-pixel to classify its type, whether it’s disk, spheroidal, or irregular shaped. The goal is to trawl through petabytes of images, picking out faraway systems, far faster than humans can.
A paper detailing the code was published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.
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There’s a new comet in town and you don’t need a fancy multi-million-dollar telescope to see it. Just regular eyeballs
The venerable Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), run by NASA and ESA, has discovered a new comet faintly visible right now with the naked eye from Earth’s southern hemisphere.
Amateur astronomer Michael Mattiazzo spotted the comet – named C/2020 F8, or SWAN after the instrument – after spotting it hurtling by Earth in April using publicly available data from the probe.
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