Moon - Venus - Mars

"NASA Langley researchers want to get a better idea about conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus, so they have come up with HAVOC or a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept – a lighter-than-air rocket ship that would help send two astronauts on a 30-day mission to explore the planet’s atmosphere. Exploration of Venus is a challenge not only because its smog-like sulfuric acid-laced atmosphere, but also its extremely hot surface temperature and extremely high air pressure on the surface."  

"The video shows a human mission that’s part of a multi-phase campaign to explore and potentially settle Venus. Before the mission in the video occurred, there would be similar robotic missions to test the technologies and better understand the atmosphere. Eventually, a short duration human mission would allow us to gain experience having humans live at another world, with the hope that it would someday be possible to live in the atmosphere permanently (hinted at in the closing shot of the video)."

Solar System Infographs

I do love me a good artist drawing of the Solar System. This time with moons and more facts! Art by Vadim Sadovski.

Die Perkins-Stimmen wieder vereint ...

  Die Startfolge der Hörspielserie Mark Brandis, Raumkadett überrascht die Commander-Perkins-Fans mit einer Wiedervereinigung der Stimmen ihrer Helden: Nach 34 Jahren sind Horst Stark, Gabi Libbach und Gernot Endemann erstmals wieder zusammen in einem Science-Fiction-Werk zu hören …

Alle Links in unserer “Ortungsleitzentrale” (olz)…

Computer Simulated Global View of Venus.

📷 NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech

Clearest image ever taken of Venus. Photo by JAXA.

Could we create dark matter?

85% of the matter in our universe is a mystery. We don’t know what it’s made of, which is why we call it dark matter. But we know it’s out there because we can observe its gravitational attraction on galaxies and other celestial objects. 

We’ve yet to directly observe dark matter, but scientists theorize that we may actually be able to create it in the most powerful particle collider in the world. That’s the 27 kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in Geneva, Switzerland.

So how would that work? In the LHC, two proton beams move in opposite directions and are accelerated to near the speed of light. At four collision points, the beams cross and protons smash into each other.

Protons are made of much smaller components called quarks and gluons. 

In most ordinary collisions, the two protons pass through each other without any significant outcome.

However, in about one in a million collisions, two components hit each other so violently, that most of the collision energy is set free producing thousands of new particles. 

It’s only in these collisions that very massive particles, like the theorized dark matter, can be produced.

So it takes quadrillions of collisions combined with theoretical models to even start to look for dark matter. That’s what the LHC is currently doing. By generating a mountain of data, scientists at CERN are hoping to find more tiny bumps in graphs that will provide evidence for yet unknown particles, like dark matter. Or maybe what they’ll find won’t be dark matter, but something else that would reshape our understanding of how the universe works entirely. 

And that’s part of the fun at this point. We have no idea what they’re going to find.

From the TED-Ed Lesson Could we create dark matter? - Rolf Landua

Animation by Lazy Chief

The sky seemed to smile over much of planet Earth. Visible the world over was an unusual superposition of our Moon and the planets Venus and Jupiter. A crescent Moon over Los Angeles appears to be a smile when paired with the planetary conjunction of seemingly nearby Jupiter and Venus.

The 4 Terrestrial Planets