NASA’s ECOSTRESS mission is studying how plants sweat, providing detailed measurements of plant temperatures from space.
Category: space – Page 931
Five in a row—the planets align in the night sky
For the second time this year, the five brightest planets can be seen at the same time. You can catch them by looking towards the western sky after sunset. The planets will form a line rising up from the horizon.
Mercury and Venus are low to the west, with bright Jupiter shining just above. Higher up in the northwestern sky is Saturn, and completing the set of five is the red planet Mars, high overhead.
On Friday October 12 a beautiful crescent Moon sits just to the right of Jupiter. Keep watching the planets night after night and you can track the progression of the Moon.
Some Physicists Think Time May Be Slowing Down
The universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. At least, that’s what the vast majority of scientists would have you believe. But according to a team of Spanish physicists, it may not be the expansion of the universe that’s changing rate, but time itself. Time might be slowing down, and that means that it could eventually stop altogether.
Almost like Columbia: Two crew members dodge death by an inch in botched Russian space launch
Today’s launch abort was the first ever failure of the Soyuz FG launch vehicle, since it started in service in 2001.
A botched launch of the Russian spaceship Soyuz narrowly avoided becoming the latest fatal space incident on Thursday. Rescue systems managed to save the lives of two crew members and conduct an emergency landing.
The Soyuz-MS-10 spacecraft was meant to deliver Roscosmos’ Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, members of Expedition 57/58, to the International Space Station (ISS). But 119 seconds after take-off from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan the Soyuz-FG launch vehicle experienced a malfunction and crew rescue protocols were engaged.
Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot
In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents of this portal to the past were some yellowing newspapers, a Mercury dime, a student handbook, and a building permit. The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”
Such disappointment in time capsules seems to run endemic, suggests William E. Jarvis in his book Time Capsules: A Cultural History. A headline from The Onion, he notes, sums it up: “Newly unearthed time capsule just full of useless old crap.” Time capsules, after all, exude a kind of pathos: They show us that the future was not quite as advanced as we thought it would be, nor did it come as quickly. The past, meanwhile, turns out to not be as radically distinct as we thought.
In his book Predicting the Future, Nicholas Rescher writes that “we incline to view the future through a telescope, as it were, thereby magnifying and bringing nearer what we can manage to see.” So too do we view the past through the other end of the telescope, making things look farther away than they actually were, or losing sight of some things altogether.