It will be some time until astronauts can 3D-print tools on Mars, and Stanford University’s ReachBot may be able to explore Martian caves without them. This small robot uses lightweight extendable booms to achieve large reach with a small footprint, enabling it to access steep, vertical, and overhanging surfaces in otherwise dangerous natural voids.
NASA’s sonification of RS Puppis, a cepheid variable star located 6,500 light-years from Earth, lets you hear what one of the brightest and biggest stars in the Mihttps://www.techeblog.com/sonification-of-rs-puppis-star/lky Way galaxy could sound like. It’s 200 times larger than our Sun and draped with dust reflecting starlight, rhythmically brightening and dimming over a six-week cycle.
You’ve probably seen the Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, before, but the Hubble Space Telescope managed to capture it from a new angle. It’s located 161,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud and the swirls you see are turbulent clouds of gas and dust amongst the newly formed stars.
Photo credit: Giuseppe Parisi
NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has for the first time directly measured the mass of a single, isolated white dwarf, called LAWD 37. This white dwarf is around 56% the mass of our Sun and provides insights into theories of their structure as well as composition. For this discovery, researchers had to use gravitational microlensing.
Within this century, astronauts will be turning soil on Mars into geopolymer cement, but in just a few more years, the ESA’s Sample Transfer Arm robot will be collecting tubes left on the Martian surface by NASA’s Perseverance rover. This 2.5 meter-long (8.2 foot) robotic arm will be fully autonomous, highly reliable and very dexterous.
Astronomers at NOIRLab used the SMARTS 1.5-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) to detect a star system that one day will form a kilonova. The difference between a supernova and kilonova is the fact that the former occurs when a star with 8 solar masses collapses into themselves, while the former happens when 2 neutron stars in a binary system collide.
We haven’t yet solved the mystery of dark matter, but this universe size comparison 3D animation by Global Data does show us how small Earth and our solar system really is. What really stands out is Keppler-22b, which is an exoplanet roughly twice the size of our planet, located within the habitable zone of the Sun-like star Kepler-22.
NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has officially dropped off its final sample tube at the depot, which will eventually be recovered by the future NASA / ESA Mars Sample Return campaign. These samples consist of rocks the mission team deems scientifically significant in the ‘Three Forks’ region of the Jezero Crater.
NASA / ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured young variable stars in the Orion Nebula, located approximately 1,450 light-years from Earth. V 372 Orionis is the brightest young variable star in this image, classified as an Orion Variable, and experiences vast changes in luminosity due to growing pains.
It’s official, NASA has successfully tested the first full-scale rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE), an advanced design that could be used for future deep space missions. Unlike traditional rocket engines that generate thrust using a supersonic combustion phenomenon known as a detonation, the RDRE design generates more power while using less fuel by incorporating a NASA-developed copper-alloy GRCop-42 with the powder bed fusion additive manufacturing process. This enables the engine to operate under extreme conditions for longer durations without overheating.