Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space

Circa 2019

An asteroid that’s filled with gold and enough precious metals to turn everyone on Earth into a billionaire is being studied by NASA.

The asteroid – known as 16 Psyche – has a mass of less than 1% of our moon and it contains heaps of platinum, iron and nickel alongside the gold. The combined total value of all those precious metals would equal out at something like $700 quintillion.

If you brought it back to Earth and shared out the profits equally, it would make all seven billion of us a billionaire many times over.

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Two other international teams are planning Mars launches in July. NASA plans to deploy a rover named Perseverance, and the United Arab Emirates will send a probe called Hope. The European and Russian space agencies were planning to send a probe to Mars this year, but announced on Thursday that the launch will be delayed by two years so they can finish important tests, and partly because of the coronavirus pandemic.

China’s first journey to Mars is one of the most anticipated space missions of the year. But with parts of the country in some form of lockdown because of the coronavirus, the mission teams have had to find creative ways to continue their work.

Researchers involved in the mission remain tight-lipped about its key aspects, but several reports from Chinese state media say that the outbreak will not affect the July launch — the only window for another two years.

“The launch is so important politically that they will make it happen,” says Raymond Arvidson, a planetary geologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who has been involved with several US Mars missions.

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A simple tractor beam can pull them away like a higgs boson tractor beam.

Too bad they are likely uninhabitable.

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A mind-bending new paper suggests our entire Milky Way galaxy could be located inside an enormous bubble where matter is much less dense than everywhere else.

If research bears the theory out, it’d mean that our galactic neighborhood is very different from the rest of the universe — and it could potentially solve a huge problem looming over the astrophysics field.

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Permanent magnets akin to those used on refrigerators could speed the development of fusion energy—the same energy produced by the sun and stars.

In principle, such magnets can greatly simplify the design and production of twisty fusion facilities called stellarators, according to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany. PPPL founder Lyman Spitzer Jr. invented the in the early 1950s.

Most stellarators use a set of complex twisted coils that spiral like stripes on a candy cane to produce magnetic fields that shape and control the plasma that fuels fusion reactions. Refrigerator-like could produce the hard part of these essential fields, the researchers say, allowing simple, non-twisted coils to produce the remaining part in place of the complex coils.

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Rosalind Franklin has been built to try to detect life, past or present, on the Red Planet.

Because of this, the rover and its instruments have been prepared to incredibly stringent levels of cleanliness. This status must now be maintained over the coming two years of storage.

The project’s industrial prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space of Italy, will do this in an ISO-7 chamber at its Turin factory.

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Ann Druyan, who co-wrote the original 1980s series with her late husband, is back at work as this season’s executive producer, writer and director. Her book, “Cosmos: Possible Worlds,” was recently published as a companion to the series, which will be aired on March 9 at 8/7c on National Geographic. We were lucky enough to catch up with Druyan to talk more about her latest projects.

You’ve described this season of “Cosmos” as the “boldest” season yet. Can you elaborate on that, without giving too much away?

I think it’s the boldest in that it appears to present such an optimistic vision of the future, and that sets it apart, I think, in many ways from most of our entertainment. Of course, our entertainment is just a reflection of the reality we’re coping with, but this “Cosmos” is not only a vision of a magnificent future, but a vision of a magnificent future if we learn to use our science in high technology with wisdom. It’s the future we can still have and so many of the stories in both book and show are the stories of our ancestors who endured terrible situations. Every single person alive today is descended from humans who have been back to the wall repeatedly, but rose to the challenge.

And so, [the theme of] “possible worlds” works on many different levels. It’s the possible worlds of exoplanets we’ve yet to discover. It’s the possible world within, the science of our brains and the dream of creating connectomes similar to a genome — one consisting of all our thoughts, associations, memory.

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The virtually identical oxygen isotope compositions of the Earth and Moon revealed by Apollo return samples have been a challenging constraint for lunar formation models. For a giant impact scenario to explain this observation, either the precursors to the Earth and Moon had identical oxygen isotope values or extensive homogenization of the two bodies occurred following the impact event. Here we present high-precision oxygen isotope analyses of a range of lunar lithologies and show that the Earth and Moon in fact have distinctly different oxygen isotope compositions. Oxygen isotope values of lunar samples correlate with lithology, and we propose that the differences can be explained by mixing between isotopically light vapour, generated by the impact, and the outermost portion of the early lunar magma ocean. Our data suggest that samples derived from the deep lunar mantle, which are isotopically heavy compared to Earth, have isotopic compositions that are most representative of the proto-lunar impactor ‘Theia’. Our findings imply that the distinct oxygen isotope compositions of Theia and Earth were not completely homogenized by the Moon-forming impact, thus providing quantitative evidence that Theia could have formed farther from the Sun than did Earth.

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