NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is expected to launch sometime next year, so you’d be right to assume that NASA is making strides in manufacturing its next-generation rover and its accompanying landing gear in preparation for the big day. In this video, NASA’s Jennifer Trosper gives us an inside look at the progress that’s being made on the Mars 2020 rover. While the rover doesn’t look like much as of right now, Trosper says it’ll be completed sometime in the next several months. Other critical components, such as the cruise stage, the descent stage, the air shell, and the heat shield,...
British and American scientists have proved that billions of years ago the Earth resembled the modern Titan, a satellite of Saturn with an atmosphere and vast seas, high mountains, rivers, dunes, mists. Everything is like Earth’s, but with one difference: the temperature of Saturn’s largest satellite is minus 180 degrees, and rivers and oceans contain hydrocarbons. The results of their research were published in the new issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to scientists, 2.4 billion years ago, the Earth’s atmosphere, like Titan’s, contained huge amounts of methane – a gas produced by microorganisms, the...
SpaceX made history last February when it flew an electric Tesla Roadster supercar into outer space with the help of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which just so happens to be the most powerful production rocket ever built by a commercial space company. But have you ever wondered where that car is and how it’s doing in space? Fun fact: the Tesla Roadster that SpaceX put in outer space is orbiting the Sun as you read this, and more importantly, it has traveled much farther than any other car ever made. In fact, experts estimate that it has traveled a distance equivalent to...
NASA is speeding up its plans to return to the Moon, and this time, the US space agency says it will stay there. Jim Bridstein, a NASA administrator, told reporters on last week, that the agency plans to speed up plans backed by President Donald Trump to return to the moon using private companies. “It is important to get back to the Moon as quickly as possible,” said Bridestin, adding that he hoped astronauts would be sent to Earth’s natural satellite by 2028. “This time, when we go to the moon, we will actually stay, we will not leave any...
Recently processed data from NASA’s Galileo orbiter have allowed spectacular video sequences to be produced from the flyby over Jupiter’s Moon Europa. Europa is the sixth natural satellite of Jupiter in increasing order of distance and the smallest of the four Galilean satellites. It was discovered in 1610 by Galileo and named after Europa, the mother of King Minos of Crete and lover of Zeus. Slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon, Europa is composed mainly of silicates and has an icy crust. It has a core that’s most likely made out of iron and nickel. It has a tenuous atmosphere composed of oxygen,...
Imagine that you can get the energy from every star in a radius of 100 million light-years. Of thousands of galaxies, each of which has billions of stars. Try to imagine that you are capable of taking this kind of energy and using it in the greatest super weapon in the universe. The ruin you will cause is unimaginable. In fact, you do not have to imagine it, because all of this already exists in the form of gamma rays. What are these “space snipers” that shoot the Universe at random intervals. What happens if they hit us? Another interesting...
Uranus – the giant gas world, located 2.8 million kilometers from the Sun – is quite stormy. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured one of these storms, floating in the green-blue atmosphere of the Planet. Literally, the entire North Pole is occupied by hurricane! “Scientists believe this new feature of Uranus is the result of its unique rotation,” NASA writes. Unlike all other planets in the Solar System, Uranus is tipped on its side. This means that the Sun has been shining the North Pole constantly during the local long summer. And this in turn leads to widespread atmospheric...
Why does time seem to move forward? It’s a riddle that’s puzzled physicists for well over a century, and they’ve come up with numerous theories to explain time’s arrow. The latest, though, suggests that while time moves forward in our universe, it may run backwards in another, mirror universe that was created on the “other side” of the Big Bang. Two leading theories propose to explain the direction of time by way of the relatively uniform conditions of the Big Bang. At the very start, what is now the universe was homogeneously hot, so much so that matter didn’t really...
Our home galaxy is not the thin, clean spiral we had envisioned. Researchers created the first 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy and figured out what makes it warped and twisted. So, we now know that the Milky Way isn’t flat. Scientists from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia have published a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy revealing an unprecedented 3D map of the galaxy we live in. The scientists used the locations of 1339 ‘standard’ stars to map the outline of the Milky Way galaxy called Classical Cepheids....
