Credit: Pavel Odinev (Skoltech)
Researchers from Skoltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analyzed several dozen options to pick the best one in terms of performance and costs for the last mile of a future mission to the Moon - actually delivering astronauts to the lunar surface and back up to the safety of the orbiting lunar station. The paper was published in the journal
Acta Astronautica.
Ever since December 1972, when the crew of Apollo 17 left the lunar surface, humans have been eager to return to the Moon. In 2017, the US government launched the Artemis program, which intends to bring the first woman and the next man to the lunar south pole by 2024. The Artemis mission will use a new orbital platform, dubbed the Lunar Gateway, which is going to be a permanent space station from which reusable modules will bring astronauts back to the Moon. This new approach requires a reanalysis of the optimal landing approaches; the private companies contracted by NA
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IMAGE: An infrared image of the dust clouds in the Cocoon region taken with the Spitzers Space Telescope s IR photometer. The HAWC TeV gamma-ray excess (color from green to yellow to. view more
Credit: TeV: Binita Hona (HAWC Collaboration), IR: Hora et. al, Spitzer s Growing Legacy, ASP Conference Series, 2010, P. Ogle, ed.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 11, 2021 A long-time question in astrophysics appears to finally be answered, thanks to a collection of large, high-tech water tanks on a mountainside in Mexico. The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) data shows that the highest-energy cosmic rays come not from supernovae, but from star clusters.
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Credit: Rafael Luis Méndez Peña/Sciworthy.com
A researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is the lead author of a study with proposals for technosignatures -evidence for the use of technology or industrial activity in other parts of the Universe- for future NASA missions. The article, published in the specialized journal
Acta Astronautica, contains the initial conclusions of a meeting of experts in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, sponsored by the space agency to gather advice about this topic.
In the article, several ideas are presented to search for technosignatures that would indicate the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, from the most humdrum, such as the presence of industrial pollution in the atmosphere or large swarms of satellites, to hypothetical gigantic space engineering work, such as heat shields to fend off climate change, or Dyson spheres for optimum use of the light from the local star. Some of the propo
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IMAGE: The main panel of this graphic is an artist s illustration of a
close-up view of a quasar and its jet, like the one in PJ352-52. The inset contains X-ray data from
Chandra. view more
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/JPL/T. Connor; Optical: Gemini/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Infrared: W.M. Keck
Observatory; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
Astronomers have discovered evidence for an extraordinarily long jet of particles coming from a supermassive black hole in the early universe, using NASA s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
If confirmed, it would be the most distant supermassive black hole with a jet detected in X-rays. Coming from a galaxy about 12.7 billion light-years from Earth, the jet may help explain how the biggest black holes formed at a very early time in the universe s history.
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IMAGE: Infection of human intestinal epithelial cells by Salmonella Typhimurium during spaceflight aboard NASA Space Shuttle mission STS-131. view more
Credit: Graphic by Shireen Dooling for the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University
Astronauts face many challenges to their health, due to the exceptional conditions of spaceflight. Among these are a variety of infectious microbes that can attack their suppressed immune systems.
Now, in the first study of its kind, Cheryl Nickerson, lead author Jennifer Barrila and their colleagues describe the infection of human cells by the intestinal pathogen Salmonella Typhimurium during spaceflight. They show how the microgravity environment of spaceflight changes the molecular profile of human intestinal cells and how these expression patterns are further changed in response to infection. In another first, the researchers were also able to detect molecular changes in the bacterial pathogen while inside the infected