Lifeboat Foundation

Next October, Venus will be the focus of an international campaign of coordinated observations involving two space agencies, three missions and multiple ground-based telescopes and planetary scientists around the world. The collaboration aims to shed new light on the thick and complex atmosphere of Venus. Plans for the campaign and a call for astronomers to participate have been announced today by Dr. Yeon Joo Lee of TU Berlin and Dr. Valeria Mangano of INAF-IAPS at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting in Geneva.

On 15th October 2020, the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft will pass close to Venus in the first of two flybys of the planet during the mission’s long journey to Mercury. The encounter will provide an unmissable opportunity to cross-check the accuracy of BepiColombo’s instrumentation with that of JAXA’s Venus orbiter, Akatsuki, and for the two missions to work together with Earth-based observers to study Venus’s atmosphere from multiple viewpoints and at different scales.

The BepiColombo mission was successfully launched on October 20th 2018, at 01:45 UTC. It consists of two scientific orbiters, ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, renamed at launch Mio’), which are designed to explore Mercury and its environment. The mission will go into orbit around Mercury in December 2025. BepiColombo will use encounters with Venus in October 2020 and August 2021 to help it spiral onto an orbital path where it can catch up with fast-moving Mercury, which whizzes round the Sun every 88 days.

Apple says the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro feature the “toughest glass in a smartphone” and yesterday we saw the first drop test videos emerge. Now, PhoneBuff has shared a new video pitting the durability of the iPhone 11 Pro Max vs the Galaxy Note 10+.

Venus likely maintained stable temperatures and hosted liquid water for billions of years before an event triggered drastic changes in the planet, according to a new study.

Now, Venus is a mostly dead planet with a toxic atmosphere 90 times thicker than ours and surface temperatures that reach 864 degrees, hot enough to melt lead. It’s often called Earth’s twin because the planets are similar in size. But the modern comparisons stop there.

However, a recent study compared five climate simulations of Venus’ past and every scenario suggested that the planet could support liquid water and a temperate climate on its surface for at least three billion years. Like the other planets in our solar system, Venus formed 4.5 billion years ago.

In the most extreme regions of the universe, galaxies are being killed. Their star formation is being shut down and astronomers want to know why.

The first ever Canadian-led large project on one of the world’s leading telescopes is hoping to do just that. The new program, called the Virgo Environment Traced in Carbon Monoxide survey (VERTICO), is investigating, in brilliant detail, how galaxies are killed by their environment.

As VERTICO’s principal investigator, I lead a team of 30 experts that are using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to map the molecular hydrogen gas, the fuel from which new stars are made, at high resolution across 51 galaxies in our nearest galaxy cluster, called the Virgo Cluster.

≈2 km craters near the lunar poles provide landing sites on permafrost with permanent sunlight low enough to reach with solar arrays on deployable masts. Radiant Gas Dynamic (RGD) mining in small polar craters will allow human exploration of the Moon at vastly reduced cost. RGD mining combines radio frequency, microwave, infrared, and optical radiation with a surface-enclosing cryotrap and instrumentation to enable large scale (1,000s of tons/yr) ISRU without excavation equipment.

Moon pirates, killer space monkeys and some serious father issues are all thrown at Brad Pitt in ‘Ad Astra.’

Loki, a faraway volcanic feature on Jupiter’s moon Io, is acting up and planetary scientists want to know why.

Loki has always been a troublemaker.

This particular Loki is a bowl of magma on Jupiter’s moon Io. For a while, Loki brightened and faded with surprising regularity, but then it started misbehaving — Loki completely stopped its regular behavior for a decade, then seems to have restarted on a different timescale. Now, planetary scientists are trying to make sense of what’s happening on this faraway volcanic world.

The nighttime events are among initial results from the InSight lander, which also found hints that the red planet may host a global reservoir of liquid water deep below the surface.

It is not a matter of “saving the planet”, but saving civilization and its development.

The only sustainable development is the one that aims at space, using the immense resources of the Solar System.