Cutting-Edge News Online

What if we had the ability to chase down interstellar objects passing through our Solar System, like Oumuamua or Comet Borisov? Such a spacecraft would need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice, with the capacity to increase speed and change direction quickly.

That’s the idea behind a new mission concept called the Extrasolar Object Interceptor and Sample Return spacecraft. It has received exploratory funding from NASA. Bringing back samples from these objects could fundamentally change our view of the universe and our place in it.

Extrasolar Object Interceptor Would Be Able to Chase Down the next Oumuamua or Borisov and Actually Return a Sample

The science fiction movies may be too optimistic.

Giant Asteroid on Collision Course with Earth Could Not Be Stopped by a Nuclear Bomb, NASA Simulation Shows
by Virgilio Marin | Natural News

An asteroid simulation exercise led by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shown that our existing technology cannot take down a killer asteroid discovered six months before it hits the Earth.

Indeed, the exercise suggests that even a nuclear bomb isn’t enough to break the asteroid apart because the rock is too big. It also shows that preparing a spacecraft to smash into the asteroid is not feasible given the small amount of time remaining before the collision.

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Probing Deep Space With a New Interstellar Spacecraft
by European Geosciences Union | SciTechDaily

When the four-decades-old Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, scientists celebrated. These plucky spacecraft had already traveled 120 times the distance from the Earth to the sun to reach the boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble encompassing our solar system that’s affected by the solar wind. The Voyagers discovered the edge of the bubble but left scientists with many questions about how our Sun interacts with the local interstellar medium. The twin Voyagers’ instruments provide limited data, leaving critical gaps in our understanding of this region.

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Researchers are pinning their hopes on the telescope to study the very onset of the universe without the process being disturbed by radio interference from Earth. The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, to be planted on the moon’s far side, would be tasked with analyzing radio waves originating from space. It would be able to observe the universe in wavelengths reflected by Earth’s atmosphere. Such wavelengths could uncover important cosmological or extrasolar planetary signatures that would otherwise not be detected.

Read Article at Sputnik News

Virgin Galactic has revealed its latest suborbital spaceplane, a vehicle that looks similar to its existing SpaceShipTwo but incorporates significant structural improvements. The vehicle, built at Virgin Galactic’s facility in Mojave, California, is ready for ground tests there, with a flight test program at Spaceport America in New Mexico slated to begin this summer. Virgin Galactic’s spaceships are designed to take people and scientific experiments to and from suborbital space on rocket-powered space tourism flights.

Click Here to see a picture of the futuristic spaceplane along with much more information.

Mars’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos, have puzzled researchers since their discovery in 1877. They are very small: Phobos’s diameter of 22 kilometers is 160 times smaller than that of our Moon, and Deimos is even smaller, with a diameter of only 12 kilometers. Earth’s moon is essentially spherical, while the moons of Mars are very irregularly shaped. They look more like asteroids than natural moons.

This led people to suspect that they might in fact be asteroids that were captured in Mars’s gravity field. Captured objects would be expected to follow an eccentric orbit around the planet, and that orbit would be at a random inclination. However, the orbits of the Martian moons are almost circular and move in the equatorial plane of Mars. So, what is the explanation for the current orbits of Phobos and Deimos? To solve this dynamic problem, researchers relied on computer simulations. They came to the conclusion that Phobos and Deimos are the remains of a larger Martian moon that was disrupted between 1 and 2.7 billion years ago.

Researchers Say They’ve Solved the Puzzling Mystery of the Moons of Mars

If travel to distant stars within an individual’s lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of matter with “exotic” physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter cannot currently be found or manufactured in viable quantities. In contrast, new research carried out at the University of Göttingen gets around this problem by constructing a new class of hyper-fast ‘warp bubbles’ using sources with only positive energies. This reignites debate about the possibility of faster-than-light travel based on conventional physics.

Breaking the Warp Barrier for Faster-Than-Light Travel