Month: June 2022

Mars helicopter Ingenuity has a dead sensor but its team aims to keep flying

NeRD

Ingenuity, the small helicopter that accompanied NASA’s Perseverance rover to Mars, was designed to make just a handful of flight tests after the duo landed in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021.  Since then, Ingenuity has far exceeded design expectations, with 28 flights under its belt. However, conditions in Jezero Crater have changed since the craft’s arrival.  Ingenuity took its first flight in April 2021, during springtime in the Jezero area. Now, winter temperatures, which can drop to around minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 80 degrees Celsius) at…

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Tau Herculid Meteors Surprise and Delight

NeRD

We touch on the highlights of the memorable Tau Herculid meteor shower and also report on the recent outburst of the recurrent nova U Scorpii. The post Tau Herculid Meteors Surprise and Delight appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

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‘The Orville’ season 3 premiere sets out to show this sci-fi series is a tour de force

NeRD

Warning: Spoilers ahead for “The Orville” season 3, episode 1 Can you believe it’s been over three years since “The Orville” last graced our screens? Three years, one month and eight days, give or take. But hey, who’s counting?!  Space.com actually got a chance to visit the set in 2020, when principal photography was still being shot and just weeks before the pandemic shut everything down. We saw then just how stunning the new Engineering set was, along with the new shuttles and so on, so we knew how amazing…

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‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ episode 5 taps into some classic Trek tropes

NeRD

Warning: Spoilers for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season 1, episode 5. It’s hard to believe we’re already now at the halfway point of the inaugural season of the latest live-action “Star Trek” spin-off. It makes you wish that these shows had longer seasons. However, it’s safe to say that no one, probably including Paramount, expected “Strange New Worlds” to be as popular as it is, so fingers crossed we will get lots more seasons and if the writing only improves from this point, this will undoubtedly be the smash…

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Wobbly jets of binary star systems may affect chances of hosting life

NeRD

Because Earth is the only planet known to host life as we know it, researchers have usually focused on planetary systems similar to our own when searching for extraterrestrial life. But new research suggests that planetary systems form differently around binary stars than they do around solo stars like the sun — and that those differences could affect the potential for a binary star system to support life. Nearly 50% all sun-size stars are binary stars, and if the team’s theory is confirmed, it could double the number of systems that…

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