Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space – Page 1014

Satellites are shrinking, and so is the cost to build them and shoot them up into orbit.

Cubesats, which weigh 1.33 kilograms or less, have become popular for researchers with grants and federal agencies like NASA. But their price, while lower than clunky old-school satellites, has remained out of reach for those who can’t pay a mortgage’s worth of money and don’t know how to hitch a ride on a rocket. Enter picosats and femtosats, Cubesats’s smaller, cheaper siblings—and the companies that will help you send them to space.

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For the first time, physicists in the US have managed to measure the force that attracts antimatter particles to each other. And, surprisingly, it’s not that different to the attractive force that holds regular matter together.

The results take us one step closer to understanding one of the biggest mysteries of our Universe: why there’s so much more matter than antimatter, and suggest that the imbalance isn’t a result of antiparticles not being able to ‘stick’ together.

For every particle that exists – electrons, protons, quarks – there’s an equal and opposite antiparticle, which has the opposite electrical charge and spin, and these antiparticles make up what’s known as antimatter. When the Universe was formed, physicists believe that equal amounts of antimatter and matter were produced, but today it’s very hard to find any naturally occurring antimatter left.

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400 DAYS is a psychological sci-fi film centering on four astronauts who are sent on a simulated mission to a distant planet to test the psychological effects of deep space travel. Locked away for 400 days, the crew’s mental state begins to deteriorate when they lose all communication with the outside world. Forced to exit the ship, they discover that this mission may not have been a simulation after all.

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NASA’s announcement in late September that it found evidence of flowing water on Mars was only the beginning of the revelations that will be the result of its current Mars mission. The organization’s exploratory mission carried out by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft began with the intention of examining Mars’ atmosphere to an extent that had never before been possible, and now NASA is about to reveal what it is calling key science findings on the “fate Mars’ atmosphere.”

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NASA is being very tight-lipped about its upcoming announcements, which are scheduled to be made beginning at 2:00 p.m. EST / 11:00 a.m. PST on Thursday, November 5th. If you’re interested in NASA’s current mission though — and you certainly should be — you’ll be able to find out what NASA has in store for us the very same moment that the rest of the world does, because NASA will broadcast its special news conference live on the web.

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