Lifeboat Foundation

Engineers successfully tested hybrid printed circuits at the edge of space in an April 25 sounding rocket flight from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia. Electronic temperature and humidity sensors printed onto the payload bay door and onto two attached panels monitored the entire SubTEC-9 sounding rocket mission, recording data that was beamed to the ground. The experiment by aerospace engineer Beth Paquette and electronics engineer Margaret Samuels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, sought to prove the space-readiness of printed electronics technology.

Printing electronic circuits on the walls and structures of spacecraft could help future missions do more in smaller packages.

This has been announced by Pulsar Fusion, the company responsible for its manufacture. The name Pulsar Fusion may not be familiar to most people, but it may soon achieve an unprecedented milestone in the world of nuclear fusion. Although there are many steps to take, Pulsar Fusion has been working since 2013 to achieve a rocket that breaks all known barriers to date.

Science_Hightech — operanewsapp.

Galileo was famously forced to deny his observations as they conflicted with Catholicism, defiantly saying “and yet it moves.” But did he really say this?

One of the most interesting baby planet systems in the Milky Way has just yielded a detection of water vapor.

And not just anywhere, either. In the extended disk of dust and gas that still clings to the star PDS 70, the James Webb Space Telescope detected the molecular signature of water in the region expected to form Earth-like worlds.

This could help us work out how Earth formed, and where its water came from; but it also is a tantalizing clue about the formation of other potentially habitable worlds out there in the wider galaxy.

Dr. Michael Roberts, Ph.D. is Chief Science Officer of the International Space Station National Laboratory (https://www.issnationallab.org/), and Vice President at the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS — https://www.issnationallab.org/about/center-for-the-advancem…dership/), which as manager of the ISS National Laboratory in partnership with NASA, is responsible to the nation for enabling access to the International Space Station for research, technology development, STEM education, and commercial innovation in space as a public service to foster a scalable and sustainable low Earth orbit economy.

Before joining CASIS in 2013, Dr. Roberts worked as a microbial ecologist, principal investigator, and research group lead in the NASA Advanced Life Support program at the Kennedy Space Center.

Continue reading “Dr. Michael Roberts, Ph.D. — Chief Science Officer, International Space Station National Laboratory” »

A young galaxy cluster spotted by the Chandra X-ray Observatory may have gotten a head start on “relaxing” before is galactic siblings.

An international team of space scientists has found evidence that hydrogen peroxide on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, exists only on its higher latitudes. For their research, reported in the journal Science Advances, the group studied data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

For many years, researchers theorized that hydrogen peroxide existed on Ganymede, but it took a prior team studying data from the JWST to find it. In this new effort, the research team analyzed new data sent back by the telescope to learn more about the surface of the moon and its hydrogen peroxide.

Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, but it has not received nearly the attention given to another of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, whose features and characteristics make it far more likely to have harbored life at some point in time. But prior research has shown that the influence of Jupiter’s magnetic field on many of its moons could indicate a strong probability of hydrogen peroxide on Ganymede. This is because of its likely impact on the water-ice irradiation process on its surface.

The James Webb Space Telescope stars in “Deep Sky,” a new IMAX documentary from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn coming in October 2023.