Image (Credit): A scene from the movie Alien: Romulus. (20th Century Studios)
“The production design harkens back to both Scott and Cameron’s ALIEN movies. It’s a world we recognize so there’s not much new world-building except for the brief glance at an active mining colony. What’s different is the cinematography by Galo Olivares…ALIEN: ROMULUS works as a stand-alone movie, and is probably a better experience if you come in cold, without any knowledge of the franchise. ALIEN fans bring in too much baggage and rarely can we be satisfied.”
-Statement by movie critic Lupe R Haas in her recent review of the film Alien: Romulus.
Image (Credit): The Progress MS-28 cargo spacecraft approaches the ISS on Saturday, August 17, 2024. (NASA)
The Progress MS-28 (or Progress 89 per NASA) spacecraft successfully attached itself to the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday so that three tons of supplies could be unloaded.
As with previous resupply spacecraft, it will remain attached to the station for the next six months before being ejected back towards Earth where it will burn up in the atmosphere.
One-third of Mars’ surface has shallow-buried H2O, but it is currently too cold for use by life. Proposals to warm Mars using greenhouse gases require a large mass of ingredients that are rare on Mars’ surface. However, we show here that artificial aerosols made from materials that are readily available at Mars—for example, conductive nanorods that are ~9 micrometers long—could warm Mars >5 × 103 time smore effectively than the best gases. Such nanoparticles forward-scatter sunlight and efficiently block upwelling thermal infrared. Like the natural dust of Mars, they are swept high into Mars’ atmosphere, allowing delivery from the near-surface. For a 10-year particle lifetime, two climate models indicate that sustained release at 30 liters per second would globally warm Mars by ≳30 kelvin and start to melt the ice. Therefore, if nanoparticles can be made at scale on (or delivered to) Mars, then the barrier to warming of Mars appears to be less high than previously thought.
Citation: Ansari S, Kite ES, Ramirez R, Steele LJ, Mohseni H, Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles, Science Advances, (2024). 10.1126/sciadv.adn4650
NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 program allows interested volunteers to search earlier data to potentially locate an extra planet or new brown dwarfs near our solar system. Well, one of these volunteers found something unusual – an object with a mass similar to or less than that of a small star that was traveling fast enough to eventually escape the Milky Way’s gravity and enter intergalactic space. This object was clocked at approximately 1 million miles per hour.
You can read about this object and other efforts by visiting this NASA link. You might want to look into becoming part of the citizen scientists looking for more interesting objects.
Image (Credit): The launch earlier today of the Progress MS-28 cargo spacecraft to the ISS. (TASS Russian News Agency)
This week’s image is from earlier today when the Russian’s successfully launched its Progress MS-28 cargo spacecraft via a Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS). The resupply mission was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome located in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft will rendezvous with the ISS on Saturday.
Our Awesome Universe 