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Who You Send to the Moon Matters More Than You Think

Building a permanent base on the Moon sounds like an engineering problem. Design the habitat, sort the power supply, figure out life support, and you're most of the way there. But the engineers who've spent time thinking hard about this will tell you the real challenge isn't the hardware — it's the humans inside it. Now researchers have built a virtual Moon base and run tens of thousands of simulated missions inside it, studying not the rocket engines or the radiation shielding, but the astronauts themselves. What they found could reshape how we plan humanity's return to the lunar surface. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/GwcMsKF via IFTTT
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MAVEN Spacecraft Finds New Plasma Squeezing at Mars

A cloaked alien invasion force is approaching Earth and coming up on Mars. The first officer looks through a viewfinder and says, “Captain, the fourth planet’s atmosphere is behaving strangely. As though it were trying to block incoming energy.” The captain takes a moment, then his (already big) eyes get wide and he exclaims, “It’s a defense shield! The Earthlings are hiding on the fourth planet and are prepared to attack us! Abort the invasion!” The first officer responds, “Aye aye, Captain!” from Universe Today https://ift.tt/wc2JqIe via IFTTT
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JWST Studies a Dark and Airless Super-Earth

There's a planet out there called LHS 3844 b, orbiting a star about 48 light-years away. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found it in 2018 when the planet transited across the face of its star. The James Webb Space Telescope zxeroed in on the planet and found it to be a barren, rocky place with no atmosphere. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/9MZcPTf via IFTTT
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Earthly Hors d'oeuvres For Hungry Red Dwarfs

We know that stars can engulf planets because stars that swell up to become red giants overwhelm any close-in planets. The Sun will do this to Venus, Mercury, and possibly Earth in a few billion years. But research shows that it can happen when low-mass stars first enter the main sequence. Lithium gives it away. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/6WHlIdX via IFTTT
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The Name N159 Doesn't Do This Brilliant Star-Forming Region Justice

This ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week captures all the glory of the star-forming region N159. It's in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and is dwarfed by its much larger neighbour, the Tarantula Nebula. But N159 is gorgeous, too, so captivating that it's been featured as a Picture of the Week several times. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/uLZzI7p via IFTTT
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An Orbiting Satellite Triad Reveals Motions Inside Earth

Our planet's liquid iron outer core is slowly giving up its secrets to a trio of satellites launched by ESA in 2013. Called Swarm, the three probes have been studying Earth's magnetic field at the source. In the process, they've revealed startling changes in a molten layer region 2,200 kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean. In 2010, material in that area of Earth's outer core changed direction. Insteading of moving slowly westward, it's now headed east and picking up speed. Scientists are working to figure out why by using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm data and additional information from ESA's CryoSat mission and ground-based instruments. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/KSqpGsF via IFTTT
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Astrophysical Calibration Could "Autotune" Gravitational Wave Detection

The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) detector network has a new trick up its sleeve to improve the instruments’ sensitivity to gravitational waves: it’s called Astrophysical Calibration and it plays a role similar to auto-tune in music production. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/tYpeoCd via IFTTT
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