America’s new commercial astronaut capsule has completed its demonstration flight with a successful splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.

The SpaceX Dragon vehicle left the International Space Station, where it had been docked this past week, and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

It had a heat-shield to protect it from the high temperatures of re-entry.

Four parachutes brought it into “soft contact” with water about 450km from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Splashdown occurred at about 08:45 EST (13:45 GMT). A boat, called GO Searcher, was waiting to recover the capsule.

There were cheers at mission control as the capsule landed in the Atlantic.

The mission – which had no humans aboard, only a dummy covered in sensors – went according to the script.

The Dragon will set the stage for the US space agency Nasa to approve the vehicle for crewed flights.

The first of these could occur as soon as July, although this target date may slip into the summer as engineers work through the post-flight analysis.

The Dragon’s owner, SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, had previously expressed some anxiety about how the capsule would cope with re-entry, given that the vehicle’s backshell, or heatshield, has a somewhat irregular shape that could lead to a roll instability at hypersonic speeds.

Not since the shuttles has America been able to send its own astronauts into orbit. It’s had to rely instead on Russia and its Soyuz spacecraft, launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Nasa hopes to bring this near-eight-year gap in capability to an end with the introduction of two new commercial transportation systems.

As well as SpaceX, the agency has seed-funded Boeing to produce a capsule of its own called the Starliner.

This vehicle is scheduled to have its uncrewed demonstration flight in April or soon after.

Ultimately, Nasa will be purchasing seats in both systems to take its astronauts to the ISS. But the commercial nature of the relationship means the companies will be free to sell rides to secondary customers.

These will no doubt include the space agencies of other nations, but perhaps some private space companies and individuals too.

Nasa has already selected its first astronauts to fly aboard a crewed Dragon.

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have been busy training with the SpaceX team, learning all about the capsule’s operation and what to do if there is an emergency.

One problem that could occur is a failure of the Dragon’s carrier rocket during the ascent to orbit.

The demonstration capsule’s lift-off last Saturday was picture perfect, but some kind of booster anomaly can never be discounted.

In such a scenario, a Dragon’s powerful thrusters would push it away from the launcher to safety.

SpaceX will practise this very procedure shortly.

The team plans to take the current Dragon after its return and put it on another rocket and launch it out of the Kennedy Space Center. A minute into this flight, a deliberate abort will be commanded.

The timing is significant because it’s when the vehicle is experiencing maximum aerodynamic pressure.

If the Dragon can stably depart in such circumstances, it ought be able to handle an escape at any stage in a flight.

As with the present demo, no-one will be aboard for this hazardous test.

The first-ever all-female spacewalk is scheduled for March 29, featuring astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch.

They will be supported by women on the ground, including flight director Mary Lawrence and control team member Kristen Facciol.

I just found out that I’ll be on console providing support for the FIRST ALL FEMALE SPACEWALK with @AstroAnnimal and @Astro_Christina and I can not contain my excitement!!!! #WomenInSTEM #WomenInEngineering #WomenInSpace

— Kristen Facciol (@kfacciol) March 1, 2019

NASA, meanwhile, seems less excited about this historic event.

“As currently scheduled, the March 29 spacewalk will be the first with only women,” NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz told CNN in an emailed statement—the only mention of the all-female excursion.

“It was not orchestrated to be this way,” she continued. “These spacewalks were originally scheduled to take place in the fall.”

So it’s just a coincidence that this momentous occasion transpire at the end of Women’s History Month.

McClain will also join Nick Hague for a March 22 outing.

Holy smokes, my twitter exploded with excitement over women doing awesome things in space and I LOVE that. But here’s hoping this will be the norm one day!

Also hi new friends! Let’s be unapologetically excited about space and life together! ♥️

— Kristen Facciol (@kfacciol) March 2, 2019

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly into space in 1963. But it would be nearly two decades before another lady left Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA opened the space program to female applicants in 1978. Five years later, Sally Ride launched with the seventh Space Shuttle mission, becoming the US’s first woman in space.

She helped pave the way for femmes like Judith Resnik and Christa McAuliffe (who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion), as well as Kathryn Sullivan (the first American woman to walk in space) and a growing number of female explorers around the world.

But it’s ridiculous to think that, in the nearly 60-year history of sending humans to space, no two women have ever embarked on a spacewalk together—even coincidentally.

Better late than never, though.

Koch and McClain’s seven-hour spacewalk will be broadcast on NASA TV later this month.

The pair, along with Hague, were members of NASA’s 2013 astronaut class, which consisted of 50 percent women.

Luxurious Space Hotel Will Import Water Instead of Recycling Pee

Space Hotel

The people behind a would-be space hotel called Aurora Station say the space tourism getaway will spare no expense, according to a new BBC feature — it’ll even import its own water from Earth, so that guests won’t be forced to drink recycled urine like astronauts do on the International Space Station.

The project, by a startup called Orion Span, has a hyper-ambitious vision for selling 12-day journeys to space for $9.5 million each. But critics say the company is going to face enormous challenges before it even makes it off the ground.

Widespread Skepticism

The people behind Aurora Span claim guests will be able to participate in space gardening and use a “holodeck” — you know, like on “Star Trek” — while they lounge in orbit.

But experts say that space tourism is still a fraught blend of genuine possibility and savvy marketing.

“At the moment space tourism is a field where reality, hoaxes, and science fiction are mixed up in such a way that it makes [it] difficult to distinguish between reality and wishes,” Robert Goehlich, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said in an interview with the BBC.

“Let’s Try”

Goehlich also warned that the stakes are enormously high in an actual space mission. Any company offering commercial space travel will need NASA-like contingencies to keep its passengers safe in the deadly vacuum of space.

“You cannot execute a space mission, in particular a commercial manned one, ‘a little bit’ or on a ‘let’s try and see if it works’ basis,” Goehlich told the BBC. “You need safe operation of the spaceships, an environmentally friendly operation, and ultimately an economically profitable operation.”

READ MORE: Would you want to stay in a space hotel? [BBC]

Scientists have revealed for the first time the natural weapon used by marigolds to protect tomato plants against destructive whiteflies.

The atomic nucleus is made of protons and neutrons, which are themselves composed of quarks and gluons. The latter two are far smaller and operate at much higher energy levels than the protons and neutrons in which they are found. Physicists have therefore assumed that a quark should be blithely indifferent to the characteristics of the protons and neutrons, and the overall atom. But in 1983, the European Muon Collaboration (EMC) at CERN observed what would become known as the EMC effect: in the nucleus of an iron atom containing many protons and neutrons, quarks move significantly more slowly than quarks in deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen containing a proton and neutron in its nucleus). Now physicists from the CLAS (CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer) Collaboration have found that a quark’s speed depends on the number of protons and neutrons forming short-ranged correlated (SRC) pairs in an atom’s nucleus.

Schmookler et al develop a universal function that suggests that proton-neutron pairs in the nucleus, shown here, may be responsible for the EMC effect. Image credit: DOE’s Jefferson Lab.

“There are currently two main models that describe the EMC effect,” said Dr. Douglas Higinbotham, a staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Laboratory and a member of the CLAS Collaboration.

“One model is that all protons and neutrons in a nucleus [and thus their quarks] are modified and they are all modified the same way.”

“The other model, which is the one that we focus on in the study, is different. It says that many protons and neutrons are behaving as if they are free, while others are involved in short-range correlations and are highly modified.”

“An atom’s protons and neutrons can pair up constantly, but only momentarily, before splitting apart and going their separate way,” said Dr. Axel Schmidt, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.

“During this brief, high-energy interaction, quarks in their respective particles may have a ‘larger space to play’.”

“In quantum mechanics, anytime you increase the volume over which an object is confined, it slows down. If you tighten up the space, it speeds up. That’s a known fact.”

The team analyzed data from an experiment that was carried out at Jefferson Lab’s CLAS detector.

The instrument produced a 5.01 GeV beam of electrons to probe nuclei of carbon, aluminum, iron, and lead as compared to deuterium.

The experiment ran for several months and in the end amassed billions of interactions between electrons and quarks.

The physicists calculated the speed of the quark in each interaction, based on the electron’s energy after it scattered, then compared the average quark speed between the various atoms.

By looking at much smaller scattering angles, corresponding to momentum transfers of a different wavelength, they were able to ‘zoom out’ so that electrons would scatter off the larger protons and neutrons, rather than quarks.

SRC pairs are typically extremely energetic and would, therefore, scatter electrons at higher energies than unpaired protons and neutrons, which is a distinction the researchers used to detect SRC pairs in each material they studied.

“We see that these high-momentum pairs are the reason for these slow-moving quarks,” said team member Dr. Or Hen, also from MIT.

In particular, they found that the quarks in foils with larger atomic nuclei (and more proton-neutron pairs) moved at most 20% slower than deuterium, the material with the least number of pairs.

“These pairs of protons and neutrons have this crazy high-energy interaction, very quickly, and then dissipate,” Dr. Schmidt said.

“In that time, the interaction is much stronger than normal and the nucleons have significant spatial overlap. So we think quarks in this state slow down a lot.”

Their data show for the first time that how much a quark’s speed is slowed depends on the number of SRC pairs in an atomic nucleus.

Quarks in lead, for instance, were far slower than those in aluminum, which themselves were slower than iron, and so on.

“Understanding how quarks interact is really the essence of understanding the visible matter in the Universe,” Dr. Hen said.

“This EMC effect, even though 10 to 20%, is something so fundamental that we want to understand it.”

The results appear in the journal Nature.

source:  http://www.sci-news.com

William Maillis is not your typical 11-year-old.

At an age when most kids are focused on beating the next level in a video game, or working toward actually hitting the ball in their baseball game on Saturday, William is consumed with becoming an astrophysicist.

Most kids dream of becoming a firefighter, a doctor, maybe an astronaut or a teacher, but William isn’t just dreaming of becoming an astrophysicist, he’s already becoming one.

The boy from Pennsylvania, graduated high school in May of 2016, at the age of 9. After attending community college classes, he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University last fall.

According to his father, Peter Maillis, William began speaking in full sentences at just seven months old. He was doing addition at 21 months, and multiplication by the age of two — a time when he was also reading children’s books, and writing his own nine-page book, “Happy Cat.” At four years old, he was learning algebra, sign language and how to read Greek, and when he was five, he read an entire 209-page geometry textbook in one night and woke up solving circumference problems the next morning.

This kid is literally a GENIUS and has been declared one by Ohio State University psychologist, Joanne Ruthsatz.

William’s desire to become an astrophysicist is rooted in his strong faith beliefs. He disagrees with some of Einstein and Hawking’s theories on black holes and has his own ideas to prove the existence of the universe.

The son of a Greek Orthodox Priest, William wants to prove that an outside force is the only thing capable of creating the universe, which means that “God does exist.”

Stephen Hawking, however, who passed away today at the age of 76, held a much different assertion. “Before we understood science, it was natural to believe that God created the universe, but now science offers a more convincing explanation,” once said the renowned physicist. “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is we would know everything that God would know if there was a God, but there isn’t. I’m an atheist.”

William’s parents say they have never pushed him toward his studies or this God-proving endeavor, but rather that he’s a pretty “normal” 11-year-old.

“We’re normal people,” Peter explained. “And he’s a normal kid. You can’t distinguish him from other 11-year-olds. He likes sports, television shows, the computer and video games like everyone else.”

But still, distinct from other kids his age, William’s ultimate life passion is perfectly clear. When asked what his “dream” is, the child prodigy had no hesitation in his response.

“I want to be an astrophysicist so that I can prove to the scientific world that God does exist,” William said in a recent interview with Hellenic College Holy Cross.

When asked why he felt the need to prove it to scientists, his answer was even more profound:

“Well because there are these atheists that try to say that there is no God when in reality it takes more faith to believe that there’s no God than it does to believe that there is a God… Because it makes more sense that something created the universe than that the universe created itself. It takes more faith to say the universe created itself than to say something others created the universe because that is more logical.”

Well I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty pumped to see this “normal,” God-fearing boy unravel the theory of one of the most prolific scientific minds of all time — for as stated by the great scientist Matthew Maury, “The Bible is true and science is true, and therefore each, if truly read, but proves the truth of the other.”

source: faith.com

Interested in knowing more about the Bible?