Posted in space
In an exclusive excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts, Loren Grush traces how NASA picked Sally Ride, and why Ride’s struggle resonates today.
India’s moon rover is now also on the moon, moving around and leaving its imprint on the soil, said a senior official of the Indian space agency.
“The rover rolled down onto the moon surface from the lander sometime around 12.30 a.m. Thursday. It is moving around. It is leaving its imprint on the moon’s surface,” Dr. S. Unnikrishnan Nair, Director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) told IANS.
The logo of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the national emblem have been engraved on the wheels of the rover to leave the imprint when it moves around.
The junk-on-junk collision created even more space junk, not to mention a headache for the scientists working on the ESA’s clean up mission.
O.o!!
Ever since Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989, the giant dark smudges that appear in the distant planet’s atmosphere have presented a strange puzzle.
Now, for the first time, we have observed one with Earth-based instruments in unprecedented resolution, helping scientists figure out why those patches appear so dark and why they are so different from spots on other planets.
“Since the first discovery of a dark spot, I’ve always wondered what these short-lived and elusive dark features are,” says astronomer Patrick Irwin of the University of Oxford in the UK.
Disavowal, though, is not only about waste. The disavowal of dark truths is arguably a theme of modernity itself. Modern practices around death are revealing in this regard: In many traditional societies, a corpse is kept in the family space until its burial; in most modern societies, the dead body is carted off immediately. Embalming is common to halt (and hide) the process of decay. It is precisely this approach that Lee’s mushroom burial suit is critiquing.
From a fungal vantage point, this system is indeed psychotic. Mycoremediation may not be the systemic intervention that was hoped for, but as an expression of one’s personal concern for our toxified landscape, it is far from insignificant. Rather, it is a tangible way for people without much institutional power to engage in the ongoing fight against environmental damage, to try to contain the disasters seeping around us. As a domestic intervention, mycoremediation is modest but culturally meaningful — a method of repair and reconnection.
The power of fungi comes from the proximity they have with dark truths: the abject, the mess we need to face, mortality, vitality, kinship. In other contexts, this proximity elicits wariness, but in our current crisis, it holds the possibility of a healing power — a pharmacological power. Fungi can take on the mess and the junk, break it down and transform and incorporate it rather than ignore it.
By probing the Universe on atomic scales and smaller, we can reveal the entirety of the Standard Model, and with it, the quantum Universe.
India began exploring the Moon’s surface with a rover on Thursday, a day after it became the first nation to land a craft near the largely unexplored lunar south pole.
Pragyan— Wisdom in Sanskrit—rolled out of the lander hours after the latest milestone in India’s ambitious but cut-price space program sparked huge celebrations across the country.
“Rover ramped down the lander and India took a walk on the moon!” the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday.
The first images from India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission taken after the probe’s historic moon touchdown reveal a pockmarked surface near the lunar south pole.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) shared the images on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday (Aug. 23), about four hours after the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft completed its smooth descent.
Posted in evolution, media & arts, space
Our lifespans might feel like a long time by human standards, but to the Earth it’s the blink of an eye. Even the entirety of human history represents a tiny slither of the vast chronology for our planet. We often think about geological time when looking back into the past, but today we look ahead. What might happen on our planet in the next billion years?
Written and presented by Prof David Kipping, edited by Jorge Casas.
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Music licensed by SoundStripe.com (SS)[shorturl.at/ptBHI], Artlist.io, via Creative Commons (CC) Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), or with permission from the artist.
► 00:00 Hill — All Flesh Is as the Grass [https://open.spotify.com/track/1WuMK4qy9tUSGMINoEClxL?si=5635838259b34fa4]
► 03:56 Hill — The Great Alchemist [https://open.spotify.com/track/3PAx36jIsKiQMT9CQsRk4G?si=035fc819505445a1]
► 07:50 Outside the Sky — Trillions.
► 11:41 Hill — We Are Unceasing Beings [https://open.spotify.com/track/3TnhawPMycRrPuTnKzNGNN?si=bddf4e61177d48c4]
► 14:57 Indive — Halo Drive.
::Chapters::
New images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed intricate details of a dying star’s final stages, NASA said Monday. The Ring Nebula images, featuring a glowing halo and vibrant colors, also led to a surprising discovery, one astronomer said.
Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument provided the clearest view yet of the faint molecular halo, the space agency said. It captured up to 10 concentric “arcs” in the halo, which scientists believe formed about every 280 years as the central star shed its outer layers.
Roger Wesson, a research associate at Cardiff University who reviewed the Webb telescope’s observations, called the discovery of the arcs a “surprising revelation.”
