Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space

As the command module pilot on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, Collins circled the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. When his two crewmates returned from the surface, Collins was in the unique position to capture a photo of all of humanity — his fellow astronauts on board the lunar module and everyone else on Earth off in the distance.

Mission Control likened Collins’ experience to that of the first human in existence. “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude,” a mission commentator said. Collins later rejected that notion.

“That’s baloney,” Collins said on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in 2019. “You put some Samoan on his little canoe out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night and he doesn’t really know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to get there. He can see the stars, they’re his only friend out there, and he’s not talking to anybody. That guy is lonely.”

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Nuclear physicists have made a new, highly accurate measurement of the thickness of the neutron “skin” that encompasses the lead nucleus in experiments conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and just published in Physical Review Letters. The result, which revealed a neutron skin thickness of .28 millionths of a nanometer, has important implications for the structure and size of neutron stars.

The protons and neutrons that form the nucleus at the heart of every atom in the universe help determine each atom’s identity and properties. Nuclear physicists are studying different nuclei to learn more about how these protons and neutrons act inside the nucleus. The Lead Radius Experiment collaboration, called PREx (after the chemical symbol for lead, Pb), is studying the fine details of how protons and neutrons are distributed in lead nuclei.

“The question is about where the neutrons are in lead. Lead is a heavy nucleus—there’s extra neutrons, but as far as the is concerned, an equal mix of protons and neutrons works better,” said Kent Paschke, a professor at the University of Virginia and experiment co-spokesperson.

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When the four-decades-old Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, scientists celebrated. These plucky spacecraft had already traveled 120 times the distance from the Earth to the sun to reach the boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble encompassing our solar system that’s affected by the solar wind. The Voyagers discovered the edge of the bubble but left scientists with many questions about how our Sun interacts with the local interstellar medium. The twin Voyagers’ instruments provide limited data, leaving critical gaps in our understanding of this region.

NASA and its partners are now planning for the next spacecraft, currently called the Interstellar Probe, to travel much deeper into interstellar space, 1000 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, with the hope of learning more about how our home heliosphere formed and how it evolves.

“The Interstellar Probe will go to the unknown local interstellar space, where humanity has never reached before,” says Elena Provornikova, the Interstellar Probe heliophysics lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland. “For the first time, we will take a picture of our vast heliosphere from the outside to see what our solar system home looks like.”

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The Bay Area has several famous landmarks that stand out from the Space Station.

The winter months in the San Francisco Bay area offer a reprieve from the typically foggy summer days that shroud the city and water beneath a layer of low clouds. On this clear December day, an astronaut onboard the International Space Station shot this photograph of the area’s mixture of dense urban development and preserved natural spaces.

The Bay Area has several famous landmarks that stand out to astronauts. The Golden Gate Bridge is part of Route 101, the longest highway in California; it connects the city of San Francisco to Marin County. The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge crosses over and tunnels through Yerba Buena Island. Both bridges stand high enough to allow large ships to pass under on the way to various docks, piers, and shipyards around the Bay.

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A person can weed about one acre of crops a day. This smart robot can weed 20.

Carbon Robotics has unveiled the third-generation of its Autonomous Weeder, a smart farming robot that identifies weeds and then destroys them with high-power lasers.

The weedkiller challenge: Weeds compete with plants for space, sunlight, and soil nutrients. They can also make it easier for insect pests to harm crops, so weed control is a top concern for farmers.

Chemical herbicides can kill the pesky plants, but they can also contaminate water and affect soil health. Weeds can be pulled out by hand, but it’s unpleasant work, and labor shortages are already a huge problem in the agriculture industry.

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The next era of astronomy will be defined by a wider view of the cosmos.

The next era of our investigation of the cosmos is about to be kick-started by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a ground-based telescope currently under construction on the El Penón peak of Cerro Pachón in northern Chile. The observatory is a federal project run by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The new observatory — named in honor of astronomer Vera Rubin — is scheduled to begin operations in October 2023, according to a statement published on the Rubin Observatory website. When it’s up and running, Rubin will allow astronomers to consider some of the universe’s most pressing mysteries.

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An international research team led by Michigan State University has helped create cosmic conditions at RIKEN’s heavy-ion accelerator in Japan.

Imagine taking all of the water in Lake Michigan — more than a quadrillion gallons — and squeezing it into a 4-gallon bucket, the kind you’d find at a hardware store.

A quick review of the numbers suggests that this should be impossible: that’s too much stuff and not enough space. But this outlandish density is a defining feature of celestial objects known as neutron stars. These stars are only about 15 miles across, yet they hold more mass than our sun thanks to some extreme physics.

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It’s clothing fit for a post-apocalyptic world, not our own. It’s unsurprising then that the company has found a large following in Silicon Valley, which is known for attracting vast resources and the kinds of people absorbed in questions of where we’re all headed. Many have, after all, bought up the boltholes and bunkers to prove it.

A Vollebak rack would sooner belong in a military surplus warehouse than a high street clothing store.

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