NASA recently delivered $10 million in funding to Ad Astra Rocket Company of Texas for further development of its Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), an electromagnetic thruster proficient of propelling a spaceship to Mars in just 39 days. NASA’s funding was part of the “12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnership.” Ad Astra’s rocket will travel ten times quicker than today’s chemical rockets while using one-tenth the amount of fuel. The VASIMR system would cut the trip to Mars by months according to Franklin Chang Diaz, a former MIT student, NASA astronaut, and now CEO of Ad Astra. Image result for VASIMR Plasma Engine According to Diaz, “this is like no other rocket that you may have seen in the past. It is a plasma rocket. The VASIMR Rocket is not used for launching things; it is used for things already in orbit. This is called “in-space propulsion.” VASIMR heats plasma, an electrically charged gas, to exceptionally high temperatures using radio wav
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope detected an Earth-like planet circling a neighbouring star in our galaxy's Goldilocks zone. Kepler-186f is located in the Cygnus constellation around 500 light-years from Earth. The habitable zone, also known as the Goldilocks zone, is the region of space around a star where planetary-mass objects with sufficient atmospheric pressure can support liquid water on their surfaces. While it is estimated that there are at least 40 billion Earth-sized planets surrounding our Milky Way Galaxy, this is the first Earth-sized planet identified in another star's habitable zone. In addition to Kepler-186f, the Kepler-186f system contains four more planets that orbit a neighbouring star. This indicates that if the planet's neighbouring star is similar to our Sun, the possibility of life on this planet increases enormously. "We know of only one planet on which life may exist - Earth." "When we seek for life outside our solar system, we focu
NASA has recently captured an eerie audio clip that represents actual sound waves rippling through the gas and plasma in the Perseus galaxy cluster, located 250 million light years from Earth. This mysterious pulsating light, known as GPM J1839–10, has been blinking in space every 21 minutes since at least 1988, and scientists are still trying to figure out what it is. The common belief that space is silent stems from the fact that most of it is a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to travel. However, the Perseus galaxy cluster has so much gas that actual sound waves have been detected. These acoustic signals were first identified in 2003 in data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, but they have never been brought into the hearing range of the human ear until now. The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a ~vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel. A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we've picked up actual sound. He
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