Ahhh but...

Like for example how GPS (and other GNSS, space-time-motion) systems work to keep you on the road and to keep airplanes flying even when the pilots are blinded by the weather?...

The beauty of Science is that the most obscure physical minutiae do have a huge impact every day on our ever more modern way of life.


Keep searchin'!
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Experience the vastness of the solar system on an epic, 6-mile sculpture trail
An installation designed by children’s illustrator Oliver Jeffers unfolds at a scale of 591 million to 1, and it only takes one large step to get from the Earth to the Moon.

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Something's Glowing at The Galactic Core, And We Could Be Closer to Solving The Mystery.

Something deep in the heart of the Milky Way galaxy is glowing with gamma radiation, and nobody can figure out for sure what it might be.

Colliding dark matter has been proposed, ruled out, and then tentatively reconsidered.

Dense, rapidly rotating objects called pulsars were also considered as candidate sources of the high-energy rays, before being dismissed as too few in number to make the sums work.

A study by researchers from Australia, New Zealand and Japan could breathe new life into the pulsar explanation, revealing how it might be possible to squeeze some serious intense sunshine from a population of spinning stars without breaking any rules....

Cheers.

We should find out today if a helicopter can catch a rocket.

Rocket Lab will try to catch a falling rocket with a helicopter today.

[edit] You can watch it live here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nODVPGHQcc.T-16mins

Cheers.

Well that didn't go to plan, but at least the helicopter didn't fall out of the sky.

Rocket Lab catches, drops rocket booster with helicopter in key reusability test.

Cheers.

So what have the conspiracy theorist said about this image captured by NASA's helicopter Ingenuity of an 'alien flying saucer crash'

it doesn’t belong to aliens.
Instead, the wreckage is the work of NASA, a component called a backshell that detached during the landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of the red planet in February 2021.

Scientists now have a new theory about how water got to the moon.

The Moon May Have Been Covertly Siphoning Earth's Water For Billions of Years.

There are water molecules and ice up on the Moon, so how did they get there? Asteroid and comet collisions are likely to have produced some of it, but a new study suggests another source of lunar water: the Earth's atmosphere.

Hydrogen and oxygen ions escaping from our planet's upper atmosphere and then combining on the Moon could have created as much as 3,500 cubic kilometers (840 cubic miles) of surface permafrost or subsurface liquid water, scientists say.

The thinking is that hydrogen and oxygen ions are driven into the lunar surface as the Moon passes through the tail of the Earth's magnetosphere (the teardrop-shaped bubble around Earth affected by its magnetic field). That occurs five days in every lunar month.

Because of the Sun's solar wind pushing against this bubble, some of Earth's magnetic field lines are broken: only tethered to the planet at one end.

When the Moon interferes with the tail of Earth's magnetosphere, some of these broken connections get fixed, which leads to hydrogen and oxygen ions that had previously escaped Earth's atmosphere suddenly rushing back towards it.

"It is like the Moon is in the shower – a shower of water ions coming back to Earth, falling on the Moon's surface," says geophysicist Gunther Kletetschka from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

There's no Moon magnetosphere, so as the ions smack into the lunar surface, permafrost is created, the researchers suggest. Some of that frost, through a variety of geological processes, could be driven below the surface and turned into liquid water....

Cheers.

SOFIA's 747 observatory reaching end of life, but there's no replacement.

NASA’s 747 space observatory is reaching the end of its flight plan.

One of aviation’s most fascinating marvels is nearing the end of its life in the sky. After operating for only eight years of its planned 20-year lifetime, the unique Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) aircraft, a retrofitted 747 with a 17-tonne reflecting telescope on board, is retiring.

The aircraft first flew in 1977. Built originally as a commercial plane for Pan Am, the Boeing 747SP was christened as the Clipper Lindbergh in recognition of Charles Lindbergh, the famous American aviator who completed the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic in 1927. The craft was later sold to United Airlines, before being acquired by NASA in 1997.

Using the nearly 9-foot diameter infrared telescope that lies inside a cavity in the aft section, or the rearmost part of the plane, the airborne observatory has since discovered water on the surface of the moon, revealed new planetary systems, and found the first kind of molecule to form in the aftermath of the big bang. Not bad for an airliner originally built to just ferry people around...

Cheers.

Well it looks like we'll have to go back to the drawing board on what we know about particle physics.

The standard model of particle physics may be broken.

Time for some more headaches I bet.

[edit] Mars helicopter Ingenuity suffers a glitch, of a natural type.

Mars helicopter Ingenuity recovering from communications blackout spawned by dust.

Cheers.

A 'mixed up' sunspot just fired off a huge solar flare.

Scientists are keeping an eye on a sunspot that fired off an X-class flare while "having an identity crisis," according to SpaceWeather.com.

Auroras are possible if a coronal mass ejection of charged particles emerges from the "mixed-up" sunspot AR3006, which pointed its flaring blast toward Earth Tuesday (May 10) at 9:55 a.m. EDT (1355 GMT).

The flare was caught on camera by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and spurred a radio emission alert by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), amid a reported shortwave radio blackout in the Atlantic Ocean region.

R3006's polarity is the reverse of what scientists are expecting, which makes the sunspot "interesting and dangerous," SpaceWeather.com stated. (Sunspot polarity is governed by the current solar cycle.) "If AR3006 flares today, it will be geoeffective. The sunspot is directly facing Earth," the website added.

According to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, which monitors solar flares and other outbursts, a coronal mass ejection (CME) may follow today's flare. CMEs are massive outbursts of solar material burped out by the sun, and scientists can predict whether one will follow a flare based on the radio signature. As of about 12 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT), the agency said that a CME "may be likely," pending further observations....

Cheers.

Why NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter briefly went dark on Mars.

Meanwhile.

NASA's InSight lander detects the biggest quake on Mars yet.

Cheers.

The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia has an amazing surprise.

Distant 'galaxy' isn't a galaxy at all — but one of the brightest pulsars ever detected.

A speck of light that scientists once wrote off as a distant galaxy may actually be the brightest pulsar ever detected outside the Milky Way.

Named PSR J0523?7125 and located about 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy that orbits the Milky Way), the newly-defined pulsar is twice as wide as any other pulsar in the region, and 10 times brighter than any known pulsar beyond our galaxy. The object is so big and bright, in fact, that researchers originally interpreted it as a faraway galaxy — however, new research published May 2 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that this is not the case.

Using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia, the study authors looked at space through a special pair of "sunglasses" that block all wavelengths of light except for a specific type of emission associated with pulsars, the highly magnetized husks of stars. When PSR J0523?7125 showed up bright and clear in the results, the team realized they weren't looking at a galaxy at all, but at the pulsing corpse of a dead star.

"This was an amazing surprise," lead study author Yuanming Wang, an astrophysicist at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) said in a statement. "I didn't expect to find a new pulsar, let alone the brightest. But with the new telescopes we now have access to, like ASKAP and its sunglasses, it really is possible."...

Cheers.

We've had the "hut" on the moon and now we have the 'doorway' on Mars.

Cheers.

Oh dear.

NASA Suspends ISS Spacewalks Because Its Spacesuits Are Leaking Water.

There have been more than 200 spacewalks outside the ISS since it launched in 1998.

It might be time for NASA to ditch its aging ISS spacesuits. The space agency announced a pause to all its spacewalks until it has a better handle on a lingering and frightening issue that’s causing water to leak inside of astronauts’ helmets.

The latest incident happened during an extravehicular activity (EVA) in March, but this isn’t the first time a helmet has filled up with water during a spacewalk—a potentially life-threatening scenario for astronauts. NASA has raised concerns that the aging spacesuits on board the ISS might not be usable anymore and that it may be time to swap them out for a newer model currently in development. The spacesuits that NASA uses now are more than 40 years old, and the agency seems to be running out of fully functional space suits; only 18 usable units are available on the ISS, according to a 2017 report....

...NASA unveiled shiny new spacesuits back in 2019 for astronauts to wear outside the ISS and for the agency’s upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon, but funding shortages have delayed the suits’ deployment. The lifetime of the current spacesuits was accordingly extended to 2028. Given the situation with the water leaks, it’s not clear how NASA will handle future spacewalks.

Yes, what will NASA do?

Cheers.

Well what do you know?

The 2 Billion Year Old Nuclear Reactor That Exists In Africa.

When we generally think of nuclear reactors, we think of the ones created by humans. They're anthropogenic and technically artificial, designed and manufactured specifically to slow the process of nuclear fission, producing energy as an alternative to coal power (via the U.S. Office of Nuclear Energy). But surprisingly, nuclear reactors aren't solely human-made. So far, only one naturally occurring nuclear reactor has ever been discovered as of this writing, but the keywords here are "naturally occurring." Located in Gabon, Africa, this natural reactor has puzzled scientists and appears to have been created under a unique set of circumstances unlikely to be replicated anywhere else on Earth....

...When the French scientists began to examine the uranium samples mined in Gabon, they expected to find around 0.72% of uranium-235 in the ore. As Scientific American pointed out, this percentage is the same found in other samples collected from places around the globe, as well as from the Earth's moon and from studied pieces of meteorite. Instead, the sample contained 0.717% of uranium-235. For many this 0.003% discrepancy would seem insignificant -- but as Scientific American explained, this was hardly the case. It signaled a total of 440 pounds of missing uranium-235 from the Gabon mine. So how did this happen? And what could have caused it?

Thanks to prior research about the process of the isotope's decay, the scientists in 1972 put together that the missing percentage had undergone nuclear fission, per Scientific American. This was the first (and as of this writing, only) discovery of a naturally created nuclear reactor. After combing the mines for other possible reactors, 16 were unearthed, and the area and its scientific treasures were named the Oklo-reactor. (Unfortunately, as Scientific American noted, all 16 were eventually destroyed by mining.) However, the question remained: How was this naturally occurring nuclear reactor created?....

The things that you learn every day.

Cheers.

We have another problem, but maybe a software patch will fix it.

The Ingenuity Helicopter Has Vertigo.

In the process of setting up the Ingenuity helicopter for its next flight on Mars, NASA engineers found a problem: One of the helicopter’s navigation sensors is not working.

The sensor is called the inclinometer, which is actually two accelerometers that are supposed to measure gravity before the helicopter begins its takeoff procedures. That information is fed into the algorithms of Ingenuity’s navigation computer. In other words, with a conked-out inclinometer, the helicopter doesn’t have the ability to orient itself relative to the ground—an important skill for a helicopter....

Cheers.

It looks like NASA plans to launch a few rockets from here down under.

American space agency NASA will be heading to Australia later this month for a series of rocket launches.

Cheers.

As the race is on to get back to the moon GM and Lockheed are expanding their moon buggy into a whole lunar lineup.

General Motors and Lockheed announced last year they were teaming up to work on a new lunar rover that would carry astronauts and their gear on the moon. Now the companies say they could develop a whole lineup of vehicles for work on the moon and that these could be available to commercial space companies, not just NASA...

Cheers.

Momentus troubleshooting problems with newly launched space tug.

...Two days after liftoff, however, Momentus announced that Vigoride had run into "some initial anomalies."

"We are using an unplanned frequency as we work through this and are applying for a Special Temporary Authority (STA) with the FCC to address that in order to help command the vehicle back to nominal configuration," company representatives wrote in an update, referring to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. "Our engineering and operations team is working to address the anomalies."

Use of that unplanned frequency was apparently required because Vigoride's communications system was tuned incorrectly. The space tug was initially operating at an uplink frequency of 2,067.5 megahertz and a downlink frequency of 8,250 megahertz, both of which are slightly off its FCC-licensed bands (2,075 megahertz and 8,200 megahertz, respectively), SpaceNews reported, citing a recent filing by the company.

Momentus has not specified the nature of the anomalies it is working to resolve. But company CEO John Rood did say during a June 1 webinar that the problems aren't associated with Vigoride's primary propulsion system, which had not been tested at that point, according to SpaceNews.

That propulsion system uses microwave electrothermal thrusters (METs), which heat propellant using microwave energy. In Vigoride, this propellant is water, which is then expelled from a nozzle to create thrust.

"The MET can transmit a very large amount of energy into a small amount of propellant and turn it into a hot plasma — reaching about half the temperature of the sun's surface," Momentus wrote in a description of the thrusters. "This technology is well-suited for use in Vigoride — and future vehicles Momentus is developing."

Momentus' early attempts to deal with the Vigoride anomalies have apparently met with some success. On May 31, the company announced in another update that the tug had managed to deploy two satellites.

Cheers.

Another whoops moment.

Astra’s failed launch resulted in the loss of two NASA weather satellites.

A rocket belonging to the up-and-coming Astra space company failed to deliver two of NASA’s weather-tracking satellites to space after its second stage engine shut down prematurely. Both satellites were lost as a result of the failure.

Astra’s Launch Vehicle 0010 (LV0010) successfully took off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 1:43PM ET, but suffered an upper stage failure about 10 minutes into its flight. The launch was part of NASA’s mission to send six TROPICS satellites into space — these small, foot-long CubeSats are supposed to help NASA keep better track of developing tropical storms. CubeSats are low-cost satellites frequently built by researchers at colleges and universities.....

Cheers.