Lifeboat Foundation

NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a fault protection system prompted the spacecraft to turn off a transmitter.

Engineers at JPL are investigating the incident, facing the challenge of managing commands and data over a 15 billion-mile distance. The team aims to stabilize communications and address the technical difficulties of the aging spacecraft in interstellar space.

Reestablishing Contact With Voyager 1

It’s been a couple of weeks since I was notified that the Fin+AI event was being shuttered.

While thinking about how I wanted to present it, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to put it out to the universe. So I Googled what does “Putting it out to the universe” mean?

Google replied that putting it out to the universe is a way of describing the practice of manifesting, which is the process of aligning with the universe’s energy to create an experience that can elevate the spirit. Some say that the universe listens, and answers.

Astronomers from Italy and Chile have investigated an accreted stellar stream named Icarus in the Milky Way’s disk. Results of the study, detailed in a research paper published October 16 on the preprint server arXiv, yield crucial information regarding the nature of this stellar stream.

The red giant star will explode, but it’s unknown when.

This week, see how new telescopes may reshape how astronomers view the cosmos, discover forgotten medieval cities, learn about fireflies’ early evolution, and more.

Astronomers discover largest water reservoir surrounding a quasar 12 billion light-years away.

Abstract: We report the discovery of a bright pulse having a dispersion measure (DM) equal to 134.4 \pm 2 pc cm^{-3}, a peak flux density (S_p) equal to 20 \pm 4 Jy and a half-width (W_e) equal to 211 \pm 6 ms. The excessive DM of the pulse, after taking into account the Milky Way contribution, is 114 pc cm^{-3} that indicates its extragalactic origin. Such value of DM corresponds to the luminosity distance 713 Mpc. The above parameters make the pulse to be a reliable candidate to the fast radio burst (FRB) event, and then it is the second FRB detected at such a large \lambda \sim 2.7 m wavelength and the first one among non-repeating FRBs. The normalized luminosity L_
u of the event, which we have designated as FRB 20,190,203, estimated under assumption that the whole excessive DM is determined by the intergalactic environment toward the host galaxy, is equal to \simeq 10^{34} erg s^{-1} Hz{-1}. In addition to the study of radio data we analyzed data from the quasi-simultaneous observations of the sky in the high energy (\ge 80 keV) band by the omnidirectional detector SPI/ACS aboard the INTEGRAL orbital observatory (in order to look for a possible gamma-ray counterpart of FRB 20190203). We did not detect any transient events exceeding the background at a statistically significant level. In the INTEGRAL archive, the FRB 20,190,203 localization region has been observed many times with a total exposure of \sim 73.2 days. We have analyzed the data but were unable to find any reliable short gamma-ray bursts from the FRB 20,190,203 position. Finally we note that the observed properties of FRB 20,190,203 can be reproduced well in the framework of a maser synchrotron model operating in the far reverse shock (at a distance of \sim 10^{15} cm) of a magnetar. However, triggering the burst requires a high conversion efficiency (at the level of 1%) of the shock wave energy into the radio emission.

From: Sergey Tyul’bashev A. [view email].

A 1930s-era breakthrough is helping physicists understand how quantum threads could weave together into a holographic space-time fabric.

Considering the future: What Voyager 2 has in store

According to Miller (2024), even though this instrument has been deactivated, engineers anticipate that Voyager 2 will have at least one operable instrument for exploration through the 2030s. The spacecraft continues to operate and transmit data. NASA is also hoping that the spacecraft continues to provide valid information about the interstellar medium too.

The seamless continuation of activities was made possible by the confirmation that the instrument was operating normally. In 2018, it was confirmed that Voyager 2 had crossed the heliosphere’s border and entered interstellar space thanks in large part to the plasma science instrument. Significant changes in atoms, particles, and magnetic fields that are detectable by the instruments of the Voyager probes define this barrier.