Category: space

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Vast volcanic eruptions may have…

Vast volcanic eruptions may have turned Venus from paradise (68 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit) into hell. The surface temperature is a sweltering 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead, and there’s a crushing pressure of 90 atmospheres underneath the dense clouds of carbon dioxide laced with corroding sulfuric acid. Venus is […]

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Out Of This World Facts About The International Space Station

Space, the final frontier, which few have been lucky enough to experience first hand and even fewer have called home.

The International Space Station (ISS) is home to astronauts from all over the world, demonstrating that the global community can come together for science and progress.

Here are some out-of-this-world facts about the ISS that everyone should know.


Let’s talk basics

The International Space Station (ISS) has been orbiting the planet for more than 20 years, since November 2000.

It is the single most expensive object ever built. The cost has been estimated at over $120 billion!

An international crew of between three to six people live and work aboard the ISS while traveling at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes.

In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 full orbits of Earth, traversing through 16 sunrises and sunsets.

It’s a small world after all

240 individuals from 19 countries have visited the ISS so far.

But one has been there the longest

Peggy Whitson holds the record for spending the most time living and working in space. She was there for 665 days.

For anyone with 20/20 vision

Thanks to the acre of solar panels that power the ISS, it can actually be observed with the naked eye from Earth as it flies overhead.

Which is pretty amazing because it flies at an average altitude of 248 miles above Earth.

No place like home

Speaking of home-y, the ISS really is.

The living and working space in the station is larger than a six-bedroom house. It has six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms, a gym, and a 360-degree bay window.

Space takes a toll on your body

Astronauts must exercise for two hours a day to combat the loss of muscle and bone mass that occurs while in space.

It took a lot of work

The largest modules and station pieces were delivered on 42 separate assembly flights.

Since it is huge

The ISS is 357-feet end-to-end, only one yard shy of an American football field including the end zones.

There’s nearly 8 miles of wires making up the electrical system.

That’s longer than the perimeter of Central Park!

So, it takes a lot to power it

More than 50 computers control all the systems on the space station.

And the ISS computers aren’t immune to viruses, in fact they’ve been infected 52 times and counting.

Sniff, sniff

The ISS is likely one of the only places you can actually smell space.

Astronauts have described it as a “metallic-ionization-type smell.”

And, soon we can all smell it

And, for most of us, the ISS has seemed way too far out of reach. Especially if you never got to go to Space Camp. But NASA has announced plans to change all that, and allow regular tourists to actually visit!

The first visits won’t come cheap, likely costing more than a million dollars for the first trip.

But you can’t beat that view!

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Scientists Are Planning on Building Noah’s Ark…On the Moon

There are plenty of headlines I never expected to write since I started writing articles for you lovely people, and this is definitely one of them. I mean…Noah’s Ark? On the moon?

Let’s dig in here and get started on answering the many, many questions that you’ve probably already got brewing, eh?

Shall we start with why?

The answer to this is actually quite simple – you’ve seen movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact et al, right? The idea that an asteroid could suddenly slam into earth and take out all of humanity? Like, nothing left?

Scientists actually believe that, in the year 2068, something like that could be coming for us in reality.

The answer could be a 21st-century version of Noah’s Ark that, instead of containing two of every animal, would contain a repository of cryogenically frozen reproductive cells from 6.7 million species on Earth.

Dr. Jekam Thanga is the mastermind behind the project, and sees the whole thing as a global insurance policy.

“As a human civilization, we’re in a fragile state. We’re not really that rigid or able to face all kinds of adversities. And Earth’s ecosystem is also very fragile.”

They plan to utilize the lava tubes just below the moon’s surface to build the compound and a lunar solar farm to generate their electricity, and to use robots to man the laboratory, and no, we’re not living in a science fiction novel currently.

But we might be soon.

The lava tubes were formed billions of years ago by streams of lava that melted through the soft rock underground. They’re about 328 feet in diameter and could protect the facility from solar radiation, micrometeorites, and the extreme surface temperatures – not an ideal spot for humans.

At least not yet, says Thanga.

“Setting up a base inside a lava tube seems like a plausible way to go if we wanted to set up a permanent settlement on the moon. But we as humans are not mole rates. We’re going to feel pretty stuffy being underground without being able to see outside.”

Thanga says we could use existing technology and materials to build the actual structure on the moon, but the miniature robots being proposed would take a bit more finagling.

“What we envision is taking one of the existing pits – just the opening into the lava tube – and installing an elevator shaft there.”

He envisions elevator shafts and cryo preservation that shelves petri dishes much like books in a library.

There would also be a system for communicating back and forth with earth, and solar panels would be installed to turn sunlight into electricity. Modular batteries will attach to the cryo preservation modules and keep the lights on and maintain temperatures that are optimal for the samples.

If you think this all sounds a bit futuristic, think again – Thanga says this could be a possibility within the next three decades. He estimates it would take around 250 rocket launches to ferry 50 specimens each of the 6.7 million species to the ark, a goal that would be substantially helped by the private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin who are launching their own rockets into orbit.

If an asteroid does slam into Earth, let’s hope someone is still around to launch a rocket to the moon.

Someone who also knows how to use the petri dishes of cells to bring some more humans to life.

So, maybe they do have a few kinks still to work out, eh?

The post Scientists Are Planning on Building Noah’s Ark…On the Moon appeared first on UberFacts.

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Wormholes Could Exist in the Real World…and They Could Be Safe for Human Beings

With the way scientific research is going, it seems like life in our beloved science fiction stories could end up being a reality one day – even if that one day remains so far off that we’ll probably never get to see it ourselves.

One thing that has fascinated humans for years, whether they’re super smart at science or not –  are wormholes. In fiction, they’re required to allow characters to get quickly from one place to another, even if those two places are separated by many, many light years.

Image Credit: iStock

The idea that we might be able to use them for the same purpose in the real world, though?

That’s kind of blowing my mind.

Two new studies, published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D, have done what physicists like Albert Einstein and Kip Thorne could not – prove the physical existence of wormholes.

Not only that, they propose that they could be safe enough for humans to travel through.

One of the biggest issues theoretical physicists have had with explaining wormholes is the concern that their “necks” – the narrowest spot in these portals – would collapse under the weight of its own gravity. The first new paper, though, led by a researcher from the University of Madrid, has proposed a real, workable solution to this issue.

Even though these papers deal with the possibilities of microscopic wormholes, we can extrapolate theories based on the way they suggest tweaking the mass and charge of fermions – the fundamental building blocks of matter – into talking about wormholes large enough for a human being.

Image Credit: iStock

The second paper, written by researchers from the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey and Princeton University, takes on that challenge, working with the theoretical existence of wormholes that are large enough for people to squeeze through out there in spacetime.
They have devised on that forms in five-dimensional spacetime, and that would look like intermediate-mass black holes to the untrained observer, they say in the paper.

Inside a wormhole like this, they posit you would experience around 20g of acceleration – uncomfortable, sure, but survivable. Still, if there were, say, errant particles floating around, the paper acknowledges there could be trouble.

“If particles that fall into the wormhole scatter and lose energy then they would accumulate inside, contributing some positive energy that would eventually make the wormhole collapse back into a black hole.”

Which would probably be bad.

In addition to that trouble, space is really stinking cold (and that’s ignoring the trouble of actually creating the wormhole in the first place.

Image Credit: iStock

We’re still working on figuring that out.

If we (and by we I mean they) can figure out these little problems though, a trip across the galaxy would only take around a second (or less). That said, anyone waiting in regular time for you to come back will definitely be dead by the time you do.

So make sure you pack absolutely everything and everyone you love when you leave.

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Mars Isn’t as Red as You Might Think

Mars is called “The Red Planet” because of the way the surface shows up a rusty color in the images we get from the many NASA probes and expeditions we’ve been lucky to successfully launch.

What if I told you, though, that’s it’s really just the dirt – that the redness of the planet is actually only a few millimeters thick?

The close tie between Mars and the color red is nothing new; in Sanskrit, the word for ‘red’ and ‘Mars’ are literally one and the same. In Egyptian, too, the word for the planet means “red one,” and even with all of the great photographs we have now, all we see is red everywhere we look.

Image Credit: Pexels

The red is likely the result of dust particles in Mars atmosphere, which is much thinner than the one on Earth and allows for greater absorption at short optical wavelengths than at longer ones.

It also allows larger dust particles to scatter longer-wavelength light more efficiently.

The dust on Mars is high in reflectivity, represents bright soil deposits, and is rich in iron – which is to say, it contains large amounts of ferric oxides.

The most common type of dust is made from nano-crystalline red hematite, and is made up of small enough particles that the rapid Martian winds have no trouble sweeping large amounts of it around and even up into the atmosphere.

They also continually sweep over the surface, changing the landscape and features in both color and shape on a regular basis.

Then two scientists, one of whom was Carl Sagan, figured out why – the red layer we see on Mars’ surface is just a thin dusting of, well, dust and sand. It easily travels short distances, moving from higher to lower elevations or staying on like elevations, and is often blown off areas with steeper slopes onto flatter ones, changing the brightness of the color briefly.

The layer of dust that gives Mars its color, then, is only a few millimeters thick – even at its thickest, in the Tharsis region, it’s only around 7 feet deep.

More recent expeditions involving landers and rovers on Mars have proved, of course, that the red of Mars isn’t uniform at all, with much of the planet appearing more orange or even a butterscotch yellow up close and personal, with rocks and other deposits showing up an average brown, tan, or gray upon closer inspection.

Image Credit: iStock

If we could wave a magic wand and calm the planet’s atmosphere for long periods of time that dust would settle, and all of those other colors would be visible across the planet, much the way that blues and greens and whites dominate images of Earth from outer space.

Scientists are still looking to figure out the process by which those red hematite particles form, and in big enough quantities to turn the far away pictures red in the first place.

Which means that Mars will probably forever remain the red planet, because it’s the only color that reaches our eyes.

Until, of course, we have the opportunity to relocate there ourselves. Then, we’ll be able to see all of Mars’ true colors for ourselves.

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