11 Nov

Posted at 16:42h in Scoop.it

On Monday, Oct. 1st 2018, NASA turned 60. Over the last six decades, it’s had a remarkable run of rocketeering and exploratory achievements, from the moon landings to the space shuttles, from the surface of Mars to destinations far beyond our solar system. And as space becomes just another place to do business, NASA looks to keep its edge as it is facing an identity crisis. Blame people like SpaceX‘s Elon Musk and Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos in part for that. They’re in the vanguard of a new wave of commercial activity that’s launching into what had for so long been the exclusive domain of government agencies, both in the US and abroad.

 

NASA’s 60th anniversary was an occasion to look both back to a settled past and ahead to an uncertain future. The agency long-associated with America’s scientific prowess and can-do spirit got its start in one space race. Its next challenges lie in a new race to return humans to the moon and to push onward to Mars. There’s a lot to keep track of. Here’s a handy cheat sheet to get you started, with more to come.

 

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.cnet.com

11 Nov

Posted at 16:37h in Scoop.it

The electric car, which was launched on the Falcon Heavy rocket in February, is reportedly 179 million miles away from Earth.

 

Elon Musk’s red Tesla Roadster has made its way past Mars’ orbit, according to a tweet from SpaceX on November 2, 2018. The Roadster, along with a dummy driver named "Starman" in the driver’s seat, was launched into space on the Falcon Heavy rocket in February. The website WhereIsRoadster.com calculated that the electric car is now about 179 million miles away from Earth and is moving at a speed of roughly 35,000 mph. It’s set to swing back into its planned 557-day orbit around the sun.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.businessinsider.com

11 Nov

Posted at 16:36h in Scoop.it

Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: uanews.arizona.edu

05 Nov

Posted at 19:12h in Scoop.it

Solar power accounts for less than 2 percent of U.S. electricity but could make up more than that if the cost of electricity generation and energy storage for use on cloudy days and at nighttime were cheaper.

 

A Purdue University-led team developed a new material and manufacturing process that would make one way to use solar power – as heat energy – more efficient in generating electricity.

The innovation is an important step for putting solar heat-to-electricity generation in direct cost competition with fossil fuels, which generate more than 60 percent of electricity in the U.S.

 

“Storing solar energy as heat can already be cheaper than storing energy via batteries, so the next step is reducing the cost of generating electricity from the sun’s heat with the added benefit of zero greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kenneth Sandhage, Purdue’s Reilly Professor of Materials Engineering.

 

The research, which was done at Purdue in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published in the journal Nature.

 

A YouTube video is available at https://youtu.be/PMC3EE19ouw.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.purdue.edu

05 Nov

Posted at 18:54h in Scoop.it

Astronomers are building instruments that can characterize the many alien worlds the Kepler spacecraft revealed—and look for signs of life.

 

One of Earth’s most venerable planet-hunters, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, has gone quiet. On October 30th 2018, the space agency announced that after nearly a decade of staring at the stars, Kepler is out of fuel. Now, the spacecraft will stay in its Earth-trailing orbit, looping around the sun and never coming closer than a million miles from home.

 

 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nationalgeographic.com

05 Nov

Posted at 18:52h in Scoop.it

Scientists have finally confirmed that the massive object at the heart of our galaxy is, in fact, a supermassive black hole.

Researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s sensitive GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe infrared radiation flares coming from the accretion disc around Sagittarius A* — the massive object at the center of our galaxy. Scientists think that most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but they’d never before had the data and observations to prove it.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.astronomy.com