The Sci Tech World

Did you know that there is a satellite that circle our planet & is set to crash-land on Earth in 8 million years? Its duty may surprise you. NASA has complete a satellites called LAGEOS or Laser Geodynamics Satellites, which are mainly scientific satellites that learn our planet. The LAGEOS satellite circles our planet so that it can be communicated from several earth stations around the world. LAGEOS design is beautiful. The spacecraft is complete of aluminum-covered brass spheres with a diameter of 60 cm, the satellite is enclosed in 426 cube-corner retroreflectors which make the Satellite look exactly like a giant golf ball. LAGEOS does not have any slat sensors or electronics, and are not attitude-controlled. Its main mission is not that of carrying a message to the prospect populations of our planet, but rather studying and monitoring its advance. But who will live on our planet in 8 million years? Humans? Aliens? Or will life end to exist on planet Earth? Picture that life “r...

An asteroid the size of the Statue of Liberty will zoom past Earth on Tuesday. The asteroid, dubbed 2010 WC9, is about the size of a football field and will fly past Earth at about 28,655 miles per hour, according to EarthSky. To put things in perspective, this asteroid is bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza too. It will come within 126,419 miles of Earth — the closest it has come to our planet in 300 years — though it is still considered a safe passing distance. The asteroid is expected to whiz past Earth at 6:05 p.m. E.T. on Tuesday, May 15. Despite its seemingly large size, the asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye from Earth. For those hoping to catch a glimpse of the asteroid, it will be visible with a telescope for some people. But even if you don’t have a telescope, you can still see the asteroid Tuesday night thanks to a livestream from Northholt Branch Observatories in London. The observatory will stream it live on Facebook beginning Monday, May 14 at midnight local ...

Scientists working with telescopes at the European Southern Observatory and NASA announced a remarkable new discovery: An entire system of Earth-sized planets. If that’s not enough, the team asserts that the density measurements of the planets indicates that the six innermost are Earth-like rocky worlds. And that’s just the beginning. Three of the planets lie in the star’s habitable zone. If you aren’t familiar with the term, the habitable zone (also known as the “goldilocks zone”) is the region surrounding a star in which liquid water could theoretically exist. This means that all three of these alien worlds may have entire oceans of water, dramatically increasing the possibility of life. The other planets are less likely to host oceans of water, but the team states that liquid water is still a possibility on each of these worlds. Summing the work, lead author Michaël Gillon notes that this solar system has the largest number of Earth-sized planets yet found and the largest number of ...

Science is not quite sure why, but newly calculations show the Universe is increasing faster than expected, possibly the result of something we only suspect exists – dark radiation. The most recent research on star movements found the Universe is increasing between 5 percent and 9 percent faster than early in its life. One consequence of this could be that the universe ends up ripping itself apart. "A funny cosmos just got funnier," says lead Australian researcher and ANU astrophysicist Brad Tucker. "It could be a new force similar to dark energy, or a fresh particle, or it could be that dark energy itself has changed over time," he added. "We thought we were close to understanding dark energy, but now we know we don't know the answer at all. There's a lot of work to do." Stars, planets, and gas make up only 5 percent of the Universe. The rest is Twenty five percent dark matters and 70 percent dark energy, both of which are invisible and have never...

It is a well-known fact among Earth scientists that our planet periodically undergoes major changes in its climate. Over the course of the past 200 million years, our planet has experienced four major geological periods (the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous and Cenozoic) and one major ice age (the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation), all of which had a drastic impact on plant and animal life, as well as effecting the course of species evolution. For decades, geologists have also understood that these changes are due in part to gradual shifts in the Earth’s orbit, which are caused by Venus and Jupiter, and repeat regularly every 405,000 years. But it was not until recently that a team of geologists and Earth scientists unearthed the first evidence of these changes – sediments and rock core samples that provide a geological record of how and when these changes took place. The study which describes their findings, titled “Empirical evidence for stability of the 405-kiloyear Jupiter–Venus ecc...

There’s a supermassive black hole at the center of almost every galaxy in the Universe. How did they get there? What’s the relationship between these monster black holes and the galaxies that surround them? Every time astronomers look farther out in the Universe, they discover new mysteries. These mysteries require all new tools and techniques to understand. These mysteries lead to more mysteries. What I’m saying is that it’s mystery turtles all the way down. One of the most fascinating is the discovery of quasars, understanding what they are, and the unveiling of an even deeper mystery, where do they come from? As always, I’m getting ahead of myself, so first, let’s go back and talk about the discovery of quasars. Back in the 1950s, astronomers scanned the skies using radio telescopes, and found a class of bizarre objects in the distant Universe. They were very bright, and incredibly far away; hundreds of millions or even billion of light-years away. The first ones were discovered in ...

Engineers from the Voyager team dug up decades-old data to send a message to the intrepid spacecraft 13 BILLION MILES AWAY asking it to repurpose thrusters that have not been fired since November 1980. Astonishingly, even travelling at the speed of light, the signal took more than 17 hours to travel from NASA to Voyager 1 out in interstellar space. Jet propulsion engineer Todd Barber said:“The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all.” Voyager 1 uses thrusters to orientate itself so it can send messages to earth as it ventures deeper into unexplored space. After information sent to earth revealed that the thrusters designed to allow the craft to communicate with earth were losing power and having to work harder ingenious NASA engineers were able to figure out a fix from billions of miles away. The thruster test was designed to see if the “trajectory correction manoeuvre” (TCM) thrusters co...

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered an Earth-like planet circling a nearby star within the Goldilocks zone of our galaxy. Kepler-186f is around 500 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation. The habitable zone, also identified as the Goldilocks zone, is the area around a star within which planetary-mass objects with enough atmospheric pressure can sustain liquid water at their surfaces. While it has been projected that there are at least 40 billion Earth-sized planets circling in our Milky Way Galaxy, this specific finding is labelled the first Earth-sized planet to be discovered in the habitable zone of another star. What does this mean? In addition to Kepler-186f, there are 4 other planets that circle a nearby star within the Kepler-186f system. What this means is that if the neighbouring star to this planet is just like our Sun, then the likelihood of life on this planet exponentially increases. “We know of only one planet where life survives – Earth. When we hunt for ...

Planet Earth is now doomed to face a very terrifying encounter with a massive rogue ‘death star’, scientists have warned. The two astronomers from the University of Madrid have just published a paper which ‘confirms’ fears that a star called Gliese 710 will come unnervingly close to our solar system. Although this will not be a head-on collision, the prodigal sun will scorch through the Oort cloud – a ring made up of trillions of icy objects that are thought to surround our solar system. This could send asteroids and comets speeding towards Earth and other planets. The star will come within rougly 13,366 AU (a unit which measures the distance between Earth and the Sun) of our star. ‘It may trigger a major comet shower that will affect the inner solar system,’ the astronomers warned. ‘Gliese 710 is headed straight for the solar system,’ they added. We’ve got about 1.35 million years to prepare for the arrival of this ‘death star’, but no way of diverting it. The new study does not think...

Scientists say they’ve found significant deposits of water ice hiding extremely close to the surface of Mars. This is a type of discovery that could be hugely beneficial for future Mars exploration missions. The findings, published in the journal Science, were led by Colin Dundas from the US Geological Survey in Arizona. The discovery was made using the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They found eight mid-latitude locations where escarpments (or scarps), steep banks or cliffs that have been eroded away, had exposed huge cross-sections of ice. In some of the regions, the ice was an astonishing 100 meters (330 feet) thick, and it starts just 1 or 2 meters (3.3 to 6.6 feet) below the surface. What's more, the ice appears to be layered, not too dissimilar to sedimentary layers on Earth. This means the sheets could show us different geological periods in the history of Mars. “This gives us a much more detailed window int...

In the hunt for extra-terrestrial life, scientists tend to take what is known as the “low-hanging fruit approach”. This consists of looking for conditions similar to what we experience here on Earth, which include at oxygen, organic molecules, and plenty of liquid water. Interestingly enough, some of the places where these ingredients are present in abundance include the interiors of icy moons like Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus and Titan. Whereas there is only one terrestrial planet in our Solar System that is capable of supporting life (Earth), there are multiple “Ocean Worlds” like these moons. Taking this a step further, a team of researchers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) conducted a studythat showed how potentially-habitable icy moons with interior oceans are far more likely than terrestrial planets in the Universe. The study, titled “Subsurface Exolife“, was performed by Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard Smithsonain Center for Astrophysics(C...

While Asgardia is mostly only in existence online the first of territory is going to gain independence and this will be by way of the pull of the gravity of Earth and it will be the first nation in space. It will launch on-board a commercial spaceflight on Saturday from the Wallops Flight Facility of NASA in Virginia. DEPLOYMENT OF ASGARDIA IS THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG Of course, the Asgardian physical territory is going to consist in the shape of the floating file server that will be in orbit. The space kingdom that is self-proclaimed has insisted that the deployment of the Asgardian-1 satellite is only the tip of the iceberg and there is a grander vision for true space state. Asgardia may be one of the very few sovereign states that are self-declared that would be able to fit neatly inside a backpack. The Asgardia-1 is in fact a CubeSat that is small and is around the same size as a typical loaf of bread. It is one of the 14 CubeSat’s that is going to be launched Saturday after securing...

The wreckage of Chinese space station Tiangong-1 could come crashing down on Europe within months, experts have warned. The 8.5 tonne space station, which been in a decaying orbit since March 2016, is expected to re-enter the atmosphere early next year. According to Express.co.uk, forecasts predict the debris could rain down on several European countries – including Spain, Portugal, Italy, Bulgaria and Greece. The European Space Agency will host a campaign to track the descent and reentry of China's doomed orbiting Tiangong-1 space lab early next year. According to an ESA press release, IADC members will use this event to conduct their annual reentry test campaign, during which participants will pool their predictions of the time window, as well as respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and other sources. The aim is to cross-verify, cross-analyse and improve the prediction accuracy for all members. IADC comprises space debris and other experts from 13 space agencies and o...

In June 2014, 5 friends made the decision to go out into the Arizona desert and record footage of outer space with a GoPro recorder attached to a weather balloon. They launched it into the sky, and for 2 long years they didn’t hear from it: until it finally returned, with impeccable, citizen recorded shots of Earth from outer space. Some college students and their peers received permission from the US FAA to launch a balloon with a GoPro Hero2 Sony camcorder and Samsung Galaxy Note II smartphone, with the phone taking photos and the two cameras recording video footage. Ashish Goel, Bryan Chan, Ved Chirayath, Tyler Reid and Paul Tarantino decided to launch the weather balloon a few miles from Tuba City, Arizona far out in the desert, and this is the video they eventually produced. The group’s original plan was to track the motion of their balloon through GPS on a smartphone. The plan was ditched after they lost contact with the device’s location, being out of range of a cell phone tower...

A solar storm is expected to hit Earth on Sunday and while it is going to be the first such incident of the month, experts believe that it could result in a partial blackout. A coronal hole has reportedly been opened up in the Sun which is releasing a huge swarm of cosmic particles, said a report in express.co.uk. A statement published on Space Weather website says: “Cutting across half of the solar disk, a wide hole in the sun's atmosphere is turning toward Earth and spewing a stream of solar wind toward our planet. This extreme ultraviolet image from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the gaseous canyon”. The image shows a coronal hole, which is a region where the sun's magnetic field opens up while allowing the gaseous material to escape. On the other hand, it looks dark because of the hot glowing gas that was previously contained there, is now missing, the website added. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was quoted by express.co.uk saying t...

There is a massive black hole with millions of times more mass than our sun is plunging towards Earth and will one day annihilate life as we know it. This particular black hole is coming towards us at 110 kilometres per second and is at the center of the Great Andromeda Galaxy – the Milky Way’s closest and much larger neighbor. At the center of the most known galaxies, there exist a supermassive black hole which stars spin around and helps keep everything in formation. But such is the powerful gravitational pull of the Milky Way and Andromeda that they are being drawn toward each other and will one day crash. Fraser Cain, publisher of space website Universe Today, wrote for Phys.org: “There’s a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. And not just any black hole, it’s a supermassive black hole with more than 4.1 million times the mass of the Sun. It’s right over there, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. Located just 26,000 light-years away. And as we speak, it’s in th...

NASA’s new X3 thruster, which is being developed by researchers at the University of Michigan in collaboration with the agency and the US Air Force, has broken records in recent test. It’s hoped that the technology could be used to ferry humans to Mars. The X3 is a type of Hall thruster, a design that uses a stream of ions to propel a spacecraft. Plasma is expelled to generate thrust, producing far greater speeds than are possible with chemical propulsion rockets, according to NASA. A chemical rocket tops out at around five kilometers per second (1.86 miles/sec), while a Hall thruster can reach speeds of up to 40 kilometers per second (25 miles/sec). This kind of increase is particularly relevant to long-distance space travel, like a prospective voyage to Mars. In fact, project team leaders project that ion propulsion technology such as this could take humans to the Red Planet within the next 20 years. Ion engines are also more efficient than their chemical-powered counterparts, requir...

The idea that the Earth is ‘Flat’ is, in fact, a relatively new theory. In fact, before anyone came up with the idea we live on a flat plane, people knew very well the Earth was round. Even though there are countless images of our planet, and numerous videos which have been recorded from space, there are still some who argue the Earth is in fact flat. One of them is a Ph.D. student who rocked the Arab scientific community when she presented her thesis claiming the Earth is FLAT, stationary, the center of the universe and only around 13,500 years old. Yup, you read right. Not only did she suggest we live on a flat Earth, she also rejected scientific theories presented by Newton and Einstein, astronomical discoveries made by Copernicus and Kepler, the Big Bang theory, atmospheric and geological activity, most of modern climatology, and basically all other scientific teachings made in the past. According to an article written by the Gulf News, the student presented her thesis after a stag...

In the icy white desert of Antarctica, without the help of sunlight, soil, or pesticides, something green is growing. And the scientists at Germany’s Neumayer Station III are eating well tonight. Neumayer III’s researchers just harvested their first crop of Antarctica-grown vegetables, picked from a high-tech greenhouse that makes up the centerpiece of their “Eden ISS” project. The project is testing how plants can grow – not only in hostile places on Earth, like the poles and in deserts – but also in the inhospitable conditions of other planets (hopefully providing humans fresh vegetables when they colonize the moon, Mars, and beyond). The first Antarctic harvest is the product of years of work and the shelter of one very special greenhouse. The greenhouse arrived in Antarctica in January 2018, amid much fanfare for the scientists (“we can hardly wait,” EDEN-ISS Project Manager Daniel Schubert told German newspaper DLR upon its arrival, which, yes, counts for fanfare for Antarctic sci...

PASADENA, CA—Confirming that several machinery had broken off the craft and that the majority of its scientific instrument were no longer operational, officials from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announce that Voyager 1, the pioneering space probe launched in 1977, had been sternly damaged Thursday after crashing into the finish of the universe. “It appears that, at approximately 8:20 this morning, Voyager strike the edge of the universe head-on at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour, resultant in important structural damage to the spacecraft,” said Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, noting that the force of the impact with the outer edge of the cosmos had bent the probe’s main aerial dish and totally snapped off its low-field magnetometer. “While we’re in receipt of only intermittent signals from Voyager now, received data indicate that, in addition to nearly count the craft’s thermoelectric generator, the collision left a significant dent in the end of the universe as well.” JPL sci...