Lifeboat Foundation

Fascinating new image from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flyby of Venus offers tantalizing near-infrared look at its surface.

Mastcam-Z is one of the scientific instruments onboard NASA’s Perseverance rover. The two cameras create a multispectral, stereoscopic imaging instrument that can zoom in, focus, and take 3D pictures and video at high speed to allow detailed examination of distant objects.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/ASU

Continue reading “First images from Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z” »

Using 142 individual images taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z on Sol 3, the third Martian day of the mission, 21 February 2021, NASA created a 360-degree panorama.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

What would a habitat on Mars look like? Kind of like this.

Lockheed Martin starts the year with a big space contract. January contract awards showed contract value growth compared to previous years.

Internet sleuths solved it in 6 hours!

NASA hid a secret message on the parachute that landed its Perseverance rover down on the surface of Mars last week.

If we can take just a fraction of the time that’s spent gaming, and make it useful for science, then that’s practically a limitless resource.

The idea of citizen science isn’t a new one. Amateur scientists have been making important discoveries as far back as Ug the Neolithic hunter and her ‘wheel’, while even Newton, Franklin, and Darwin were self-funded for part of their careers, and Herschel discovered Uranus while employed as a musician. It’s only from the late 20th century that it’s crystallised into what we know today, with the North American Butterfly Association using its members to count the popular winged insects since 1975. Zooniverse has users classify images to identify stellar wind bubbles, track coronal mass ejections, and determine the shape of galaxies. Then there’s Folding@Home and other cloud computing projects—they count too.

Band names often come about in weird and wonderful ways. Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler named the band after a Boris Karloff horror flick, while Led Zeppelin took inspiration from a prediction about how the group might fare (Keith Moon apparently said they’d go down “like a lead balloon”). And then there’s Nickelback, excitingly named after a tradition in which singer Chad Kroeger – then a Starbucks employee – would give his customers a “nickel back” in change.

Sometimes finding the inspiration that will define your band isn’t always such a natural process. Step in This Band Isn’t Real, a Twitter account that generates fake band names and fake album titles via artificial intelligence. It even generates the appropriate artwork.

The agency’s newest rover captured first-of-its kind footage of its Feb. 18 touchdown and has recorded audio of Martian wind.