Grav wave boffins are unsure if they just spotted the smallest black hole or the biggest neutron star seen yet
The source of the collision is between a black hole of 23 solar masses and a mysterious, unknown object of 2.6 solar masses. “We don’t know if this object is the heaviest known neutron star, or the lightest known black hole, but either way it breaks a record,” said Vicky Kalogera, co-author of the study and a professor at Northwestern University.
I have a feeling that “why not both” does not apply here.
Sorry to drone on and on but have you heard of Ingenuity? NASA’s camera-copter is ready to head off to Mars
Vid NASA this week championed its autonomous helicopter Ingenuity, which is next month due to blast off to Mars attached to its buddy, the Perseverance rover.
Ingenuity measures 1.2 metres (4ft) across, and is neatly folded and stowed away underneath Perseverance. The flying gizmo weighs just under two kilograms (4lb), and sports two rotor blades, a solar panel, an antenna, a computer system, cameras, and batteries.
NASA mulls going all steam-punk with a fleet of jumping robots to explore Saturn’s mysterious moons
NASA is mulling sending a fleet of steam-powered robots capable of hopping large distances to Europa, Enceladus, or Titan – Saturn’s moons that may harbor hidden liquid oceans.
The gizmos known as Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robots for Ocean Worlds, or SPARROW for short, are quite odd: disc-shaped robots equipped with thrusters, each inside a spherical wire-frame cage. Each complete bot is about the size of a soccer ball, and is designed to bounce around the frozen landscape.
Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has re-entered the space tourism market and this time will offer one person the chance to spacewalk.
The agency on Thursday announced a new deal with US outfit Space Adventures to take two people to the International Space Station atop a Soyuz rocket. One of the tourists, according to Space Adventures’ announcement, “will have an opportunity to conduct a spacewalk outside the space station, becoming the first private citizen in history to experience open space.”
The spacewalking tourist will be accompanied by a professional Russian cosmonaut.
Okay, I’m going to ignore everything I’ve ever learned about statistics and probabilities and whatnot now and start buying lottery tickets.
Here’s a headline we’ll run this century, mark our words: Alien invaders’ AI found on Mars searching for signs of life
NASA is developing a Mars rover AI system designed to sift through sensor data for signs of life on the Red Planet and send back relevant readings to its Earth base all by itself.
A team led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center devised the machine-learning algorithms as part of a proof-of-concept study to show a future Martian trundle bot could analyze and select which data to phone home, rather than shovel all the harvested bits and bytes over space, saving time and bandwidth.
One does not simply repurpose an entire internet constellation for sat-nav, but UK might have a go anyway
The saga of the UK’s Brexit Satellite (BS)* took another turn last week as rumours circulated that the government might take a stake in stricken OneWeb with a view to repurposing the constellation for satellite navigation.
Two out of three parachutes… is just as planned for Boeing’s Starliner this time around
Boeing has put the CST-100 Starliner’s parachutes through their paces with a simulation of an abort early in the launch.
While the calamity capsule has yet to make its first visit to the International Space Station (ISS), Boeing and NASA have pressed ahead with testing its systems, in this case checking that the parachutes would do their thing even in the somewhat dynamic conditions of a launch abort.
I started reading it and then used a screen reader to have it read to me. It added to the fun. It’s really worth listening to. And really well-written. I was wondering about what kind of “access” the UK was supposed to have lost, and this piece explained nicely how May and Johnson botched this. What the actual fuck.
If they really continue on this track, and the US and Russia for some reason decide that GPS and GLONASS are going to be… erm… reducing their services, the UK could be fucked sideways. With a sea urchin.
And this is a nation in possession of nukes?
Holy shit.
