[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
SpaceX fires up Starship spacecraft ahead of 5th test flight (photos, video) Yahoo! VoicesView Full Coverage on Google News Article From & Read More ( SpaceX fires up Starship spacecraft ahead of 5th test flight (photos, video) - Yahoo! Voices )[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Spacecraft to swing by Earth, moon on path to Jupiter Phys.orgView Full Coverage on Google News Article From & Read More ( Spacecraft to swing by Earth, moon on path to Jupiter - Phys.org )[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
The spinning of Earth's inner core is slowing down. Is this how it all ends? Yahoo! Voices Article From & Read More ( The spinning of Earth's inner core is slowing down. Is this how it all ends? - Yahoo! Voices )[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Results suggests titanium-48's nuclear structure changes when observed at varying distances Phys.org Article From & Read More ( Results suggests titanium-48's nuclear structure changes when observed at varying distances - Phys.org )[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Double trouble: Gaia hit by micrometeoroid and solar storm European Space Agency Article From & Read More ( Double trouble: Gaia hit by micrometeoroid and solar storm - European Space Agency )[unable to retrieve full-text content]
It was nighttime on Kooragang Island north of Sydney, Australia, when the high-pitched shrieking started.
John Gould, an ecologist at the University of Newcastle conducting postdoctoral research on the declining population of green and golden bell frogs, raced toward the chilling sounds. There, in a pond he had been surveying, he spotted a scene that might have fit in an amphibian reboot of a Hannibal Lecter movie: A large female frog was chomping down on the hind leg of a male while slowly pulling him into a hole.
“The male frog was trying really hard to prevent this from happening,” Dr. Gould said.
The act of apparent cannibalism was the first between adults recorded in this species, and it gave Dr. Gould an appetite to learn more about the topic. Ultimately, he believes that when a female green and golden bell frog isn’t pleased by the song of a male, she might opt to turn him into a meal.
The females “are almost the ultimate predators for males,” Dr. Gould said, because their ears are perfectly in tune to the calling of their would-be beaus.
Cannibalism is well known among amphibians. But usually it is the youngest frogs, toads or salamanders that end up as dinner. The tadpoles of various species eat smaller tadpoles, for example, to get ahead in life. In some cases, this happens regularly between siblings. In others, adults sometimes cannibalize eggs or larvae — researchers recently discovered that hellbender fathers may eat their young when faced with suboptimal water conditions.
But adult-on-adult cannibalism has seldom been witnessed. For a study published last month in the journal Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Gould scoured the literature and found only a couple of examples, many in the lab, of adult frogs’ cannibalizing other adults. Almost all of these occurred in cases where the females were bigger than the males. In green and golden bell frogs, for example, females can grow to about 2.75 inches in length while males usually max out at less than 2 inches.
Dr. Gould believes that a female may be able to tell whether a male is better for mating or eating based on the strength of his calls. This means males take a huge risk when trying to attract mates.
“You’ve really got to give props to the male frogs out there, that they are putting their lives on the line to reproduce,” Dr. Gould said. “Maybe there’s a reason why, males and females, you don’t often find them next to each other in ponds.”
David Pfennig, a biology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was not involved in Dr. Gould’s research, called the study “a cool idea.” He has studied cannibalism among spadefoot toads — he has even seen tadpoles eat a toad that had already grown its legs.
But he would like to see more evidence of adult females cannibalizing males before agreeing that the phenomenon is more than occasional. While females may gain a clear benefit from cannibalizing males, there are also costs. Males might fight back, for example, or females could choke by biting off more than they could chew. Cannibalism can also spread disease in infected populations, Dr. Pfennig said.
Dr. Gould would also like to explore this idea more. And while tales of cannibalism don’t often have a happy ending, the male frog in Dr. Gould’s study lived to croak another day. After a struggle in which she pulled him deeper into the hole, he shrieked one more time and then managed to shake his leg free from the female’s mouth, hopping away to freedom.
Article From & Read More ( Cannibal Frogs: She Didn’t Like His Song, So She Tried to Eat Him - The New York Times )Super Heavy is breathing fire once again.
SpaceX ignited the engines on its Super Heavy booster yesterday (July 15), ahead of Starship's next integrated flight test (IFT), expected in the next few weeks. IFT-5 will be fifth launch of Starship's fully-stacked vehicle, and its most ambitious to date.
The spacecraft has been contracted by NASA as the lunar lander for its Artemis 3 mission, and has also been touted by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as eventually being capable of flying humans to Mars.
The 233 foot (71 meter) booster was rolled to the launchapd at SpaceX's test site on July 9, ahead of yeaterday's full-duration "static test fire," at the company's Starbase facility, in Texas. With Super Heavy secured to launchpad, the rocket's 33 Raptor engines fire at full thrust for about 20 seconds in video captured and shared by SpaceX in a post on X.
Full duration static fire of Flight 5 Super Heavy booster pic.twitter.com/8rF9KUdMUDJuly 15, 2024
Each of Starship's four test flights has gone farther and accomplished more than its predecessor, with the rocket's the most recent launch in June being hailed as a complete success. That launch saw Starship and its Super Heavy booster both return, as planned, for controlled ocean splashdowns. Now, hoping to build on that success, SpaceX will attempt to reach even further on Starship's fifth flight.
Related: SpaceX rolls Starship Super Heavy booster to launch pad ahead of 5th test flight (video, photos)
Starship is designed to as a completely reusable system. Like the first-stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, Super Heavy is designed with grid fins to help control its reentry through the atmosphere, but unlike the current workhorse of SpaceX's fleet, when Super Heavy returns to land, the plan is for it to fly straight back to the pad where it launched.
The Starship launch tower features two massive "chopstick" arms that are designed to catch Super Heavy by its grid fins, as the booster arrests its momentum to a momentary standstill in midair to sucumb to the chopsticks' tender embrace. This way, in the efforts of rapid refurbishment, the booster is already where it needs to be in order to launch again.
Related Stories:
During its fourth flight, though Super Heavy's landing burn over the ocean was nowhere near its launchpad in Starbase, Texas, SpaceX closed the launch tower's chopstick arms in conjunction with the booster's water landing, seemingly to test the system's timing and capabilities. Now, they're going to try it for real. Following the success of IFT-4, Musk wrote in a post on X, "aiming to try this in late July!" in response to a video featuring an animated Super Heavy booster catch.
As for when the next Starship launch will take place, on July 5, Musk said "four weeks," in a post on X. That timeline would put the launch around Aug. 2, however the rocket billionaire's estimates are often optimistically hopefull. So, at the earliest, we may see Starship IFT-5 liftoff around the beginning of August.
Article From & Read More ( SpaceX test-fires Super Heavy Starship booster ahead of 5th flight (video) - Space.com )
Scientists have for the first time discovered a cave on the Moon.
At least 100m deep, it could be an ideal place for humans to build a permanent base, they say.
It is just one in probably hundreds of caves hidden in an “underground, undiscovered world”, according to the researchers.
Countries are racing to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, but they will need to protect astronauts from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space weather.
Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut to travel to space, told BBC News that the newly-discovered cave looked like a good place for a base, and suggested humans could potentially be living in lunar pits in 20-30 years.
But, she said, this cave is so deep that astronauts might need to abseil in and use “jet packs or a lift” to get out.
Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carrer at the University of Trento in Italy found the cave by using radar to penetrate the opening of a pit on a rocky plain called the Mare Tranquillitatis.
It is visible to the naked eye from Earth, and is also where Apollo 11 landed in 1969.
The cave has a skylight on the Moon’s surface, leading down to vertical and overhanging walls, and a sloping floor that might extend further underground.
It was made millions or billions of years ago when lava flowed on the Moon, creating a tunnel through the rock.
The closest equivalent on Earth would be the volcanic caves in Lanzarote, Spain, Prof Carrer explains, adding that the researchers visited those caves as part of their work.
“It’s really exciting. When you make these discoveries and you look at these images, you realise you’re the first person in the history of humanity to see it,” Prof Carrer said.
Once Prof Bruzzone and Prof Carrer understood how big the cave was, they realised it could be a good spot for a lunar base.
“After all, life on Earth began in caves, so it makes sense that humans could live inside them on the Moon,” says Prof Carrer.
The cave has yet to be fully explored, but the researchers hope that ground-penetrating radar, cameras or even robots could be used to map it.
Scientists first realised there were probably caves on the Moon around 50 years ago. Then in 2010 a camera on a mission called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of pits that scientists thought could be cave entrances.
But researchers did not know how deep the caves might be, or if they would have collapsed.
Prof Bruzzone and Prof Carrer’s work has now answered that question, although there is much more to be done to understand the full scale of the cave.
“We have very good images of the surface - up to 25cm of resolution - we can see the Apollo landing sites - but we know nothing about what lies below the surface. There are huge opportunities for discovery,” Francesco Sauro, Coordinator of the Topical Team Planetary Caves of the European Space Agency, told BBC News.
The research may also help us explore caves on Mars in the future, he says.
That could open the door to finding evidence of life on Mars, because if it did exist, it would almost certainly have been inside caves protected from the elements on the planet’s surface.
The Moon cave might be useful to humans, but the scientists also stress that it could help answer fundamental questions about the history of the Moon, and even our solar system.
The rocks inside the cave will not be as damaged or eroded by space weather, so they can provide an extensive geological record going back billions of years.
The research is published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
Graphic by Gerry Fletcher
Article From & Read More ( Moon cave discovered that could one day house humans - BBC.com )
It's well known that as far as the climate crisis goes, time is of the essence.
Now a study out Monday shows that the melting of the polar ice caps is causing our planet to spin more slowly, increasing the length of days at an "unprecedented" rate.
The paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that water flowing from Greenland and Antarctica is resulting in more mass around the equator, co-author Surendra Adhikari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
"It's like when a figure skater does a pirouette, first holding her arms close to her body and then stretching them out," added co-author Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich.
"The initially fast rotation becomes slower because the masses move away from the axis of rotation, increasing physical inertia."
Earth is commonly thought of as a sphere, but it's more accurate to call it an "oblate spheroid" that bulges somewhat around the equator, a bit like a satsuma.
What's more, its shape is constantly changing, from the impacts of the daily tides that affect the oceans and crusts, to longer term effects from drift of tectonic plates, and abrupt, violent shifts caused by earthquakes and volcanoes.
The paper relied on observational techniques like Very Long Baseline Interferometry, where scientists can measure the difference in how long it takes for radio signals from space to reach different points on Earth, and use that to infer variations in the planet's orientation and length of day.
It also used the Global Positioning System, which measures Earth's rotation very precisely, to about one-hundredth of a millisecond, and even looked at ancient eclipse records going back millenia.
If the Earth turns more slowly, then the length of day increases by a few milliseconds from the standard measure of 86,400 seconds.
A currently more significant cause of slowdown is the gravitational pull of the Moon, which pulls on the oceans in a process called "tidal friction" that has caused a gradual deceleration of 2.40 milliseconds per century over millions of years.
But the new study comes to a surprising conclusion that, if humans continue to emit greenhouse gases at a high rate, the effect of a warming climate will be greater than that of the Moon's pull by the end of the 21st century, said Adhikari.
Between the year 1900 and today, climate has caused days to become around 0.8 milliseconds longer – and under the worst-case scenario of high emissions, climate alone would be responsible for making days 2.2 milliseconds longer by the year 2100, compared to the same baseline.
That might not sound like a great deal, and certainly not something that humans are able to perceive.
But "there are definitely a lot of implications for space and Earth navigation," said Adhikari.
Knowing the exact orientation of Earth at any given moment is crucial when attempting to communicate with a spaceship, such as the Voyager probes that are now well beyond our Solar System, where even a slight deviation of a centimeter can end up being kilometers off by the time it reaches its destination.
Two NASA astronauts who flew the new spaceship Starliner in June have had an unexpected extended stay in space.
While sensational headlines have referred to the test pilots as "stuck" or "stranded," Boeing — the company that built the capsule — has assured the public that the crew are not in any danger and don't need rescuing.
The astronauts don't seem too fazed, either.
"We are having a great time here on ISS," one said during the duo's first teleconference from the International Space Station on Wednesday. "It feels good to float around."
Boeing has had a long slog developing the ship, but here's the current situation in a nutshell.
Starliner is a spacecraft Boeing built under a $4.2 billion NASA contract to ferry astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station, which orbits 250 miles above Earth. Starliner launched on its first test flight carrying humans on June 5. Clinching this flight is important for the ship to earn certification for regular operations.
After NASA retired the Space Shuttle in 2011, the agency had to tag along with the Russians to get its crew to space. Hitching those rides from Kazakhstan cost the United States upward of $86 million per ride, so the U.S. space agency hired both SpaceX and Boeing to build spaceships, with the goal of establishing a commercial space taxi industry.
That was a decade ago. Though SpaceX has run its Crew Dragon as a taxi for NASA since 2020, the agency never intended to have all its eggs in Elon Musk's basket. However, Boeing's Starliner remains in the testing phase. Regardless, NASA says it still wants a second viable transportation option.
Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore, 61, and Sunita "Suni" Williams, 58, are Starliner's first crew, though the spacecraft may eventually carry four astronauts to the space station at a time.
They are both veteran astronauts. Wilmore, previously a Navy fighter pilot and captain, spent six months in space for Expedition 41 in 2014 and STS-129 for space shuttle Atlantis in 2009 before NASA tapped him to command Starliner. He has a wife and two daughters.
Williams is the first woman to pilot a new orbital spacecraft. She is also a retired Navy captain with two spaceflights under her belt — Expeditions 14/15 in 2006 and 32/33 in 2012 — totaling close to a year in space. She has a husband, along with an elementary school named after her in Massachusetts.
Though the crew reached the space station on June 6, they encountered problems with Starliner's propulsion system right before the ship docked. The issues involved helium leaks and weak thrust, apparently the result of five of the 28 thrusters malfunctioning. The thrusters are necessary for controlling and handling the ship in space.
The team has since reactivated four of the five faulty thrusters. Boeing has continued to run tests to try to diagnose the problems and says Starliner has more than enough helium, which is used to pressurize the thrusters, to get back home.
Meanwhile, teams are running additional tests on an extra module on Earth to better understand the thruster issues. These ground tests will try to replicate the firings needed for the ride back home. Because Starliner will ditch the module, leaving it to burn up in the atmosphere, engineers won't be able to check it out after the mission.
Originally, Wilmore and Williams were expected to stay at the space station for just eight days. Because of the problems, they've remained in orbit for an extra month.
So far, mission managers have not announced a return date as they troubleshoot the service module issues. Boeing leaders told reporters on July 10 that the astronauts might return at the end of this month. Ideally, the team would like for the Starliner crew to leave before another batch of astronauts arrive in mid-August on a SpaceX flight.
Despite sensational headlines calling the crew "stuck" and "stranded," Boeing has adamantly disputed those claims. They have insisted that the ship can fly the astronauts home safely at any time, such as for an emergency evacuation, but that getting as much data as possible now, before they depart and the service module is destroyed, is imperative.
Don't expect to see this spacecraft plop in the ocean as SpaceX does with its Crew Dragon. Boeing plans to bring Starliner home to the Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. A system of parachutes and air bags will cushion the capsule's desert landing.
Topics NASA
