Lifeboat Foundation

To launch another pair of Starlink stacks to orbit this week, SpaceX will break its all-time launch pad turnaround record. The first launch, Starlink Group 5–4, is currently scheduled to lift off at 12:10 AM EST (05:10 UTC) on Sunday, Feb. 12, pending a forecasted 20% chance of acceptable weather.

If the launch target holds, the mission will break the record for both Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and the overall record across all three Falcon 9 launch pads. The second mission, Starlink Group 2–5, is slated to launch at 8:32 AM PST (16:32 UTC) on Wednesday, Feb. 15 from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The CEO of Tesla has made it his mission to colonize the planet Mars in our lifetime.

Elon Musk is known for making wild promises and setting outrageous goals. It’s one of his detractors’ biggest criticisms.

But it is also one of the visionary entrepreneur’s driving forces. He thrives on setting goals that society broadly deems unattainable. He loves nothing more than having his back to the wall, the odds against him.

Science Daily reports that the astronomers found out that the mass of this lone white dwarf is equivalent to 56% of the sun’s weight. It aligns with previous theoretical predictions regarding the white dwarf’s mass, and it also sheds light on persisting theories regarding the evolution of these white dwarfs as a result of usual star evolution. The interesting observation grants further understanding of theories regarding white dwarf composition and structure.

According to the Space Academy, the astronomers made use of the renowned Hubble Space Telescope to gauge this lone white dwarf’s mass. The dwarf is known as LAWD 37.

Blue straggler stars are the weird grandparents of the galaxy: They should be old, but they act young. Finding and studying these strange stars helps us understand the complicated life cycles of normal, more well-behaved stars.

All stars follow a particular path in life, known as the main sequence. The moment they begin fusing hydrogen in their cores, they maintain a strict relationship between their brightness and temperature. Different stars will have different combinations of brightness and temperature, but they all obey the same relationship. For example, smaller stars, like red dwarfs, will be relatively dim but also cool, with their surfaces turning a characteristic shade of red. Medium stars, like the sun, will be both hotter and brighter, turning white. The largest stars will be both incredibly bright and extremely hot, making them appear blue.

A book entitled “Dinner on Mars” describes how to turn the dry, cold Martian world into a place to grow food for future inhabitants.

Gaseous planets close to their star could see their hydrogen atmospheres evaporate, leaving behind helium that could be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope.

A ring looping around the icy dwarf planet Quaoar is located much farther from its parent body than scientists thought was possible.

The first signs of life emerged on Earth in the form of microbes about four billion years ago. While scientists are still determining exactly when and how these microbes appeared, it’s clear that the emergence of life is intricately intertwined with the chemical and physical characteristics of early Earth.

“It is reasonable to suspect that life could have started differently—or not at all—if the early chemical characteristics of our planet were different,” says Dustin Trail, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester.

But what was Earth like billions of years ago, and what characteristics may have helped life to form? In a paper published in Science, Trail and Thomas McCollom, a research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder, reveal key information in the quest to find out. The research has important implications not only for discovering the origins of life but also in the search for life on other planets.

To make long-term presence on the Moon viable, we need abundant electrical power. We can make power systems on the Moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth. We have pioneered the technology and demonstrated all the steps. Our approach, Blue Alchemist, can scale indefinitely, eliminating power as a constraint anywhere on the Moon.

We start by making regolith simulants that are chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith, accounting for representative lunar variability in grain size and bulk chemistry. This ensures our starting material is as realistic as possible, and not just a mixture of lunar-relevant oxides. We have developed and qualified an efficient, scalable, and contactless process for melting and moving molten regolith that is robust to natural variations in regolith properties on the Moon.

Using regolith simulants, our reactor produces iron, silicon, and aluminum through molten regolith electrolysis, in which an electrical current separates those elements from the oxygen to which they are bound. Oxygen for propulsion and life support is a byproduct.