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The best chance to see as many planets as possible will be just after sunset on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Four of the planets - Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars - will be visible to the naked eye. Saturn will be harder to see because it will be low in the horizon. You will need a telescope to spot the other two planets - Uranus and Neptune. A good view of the horizon and clear skies will offer the best chance of spotting them all. However, the window to see all seven planets will be very brief. Dr Edward...

Artist's depiction of an Earth-like beach on Mars. (© Prasa-gg - stock.adobe.com) ================================================================= In a nutshell * Chinese Zhurong rover discovered underwater layers of sediment beneath the Martian surface that closely resemble Earth’s coastal beach deposits, providing the strongest evidence yet for an ancient ocean on Mars. * The beach-like formations extend continuously for over 1.3 kilometers, indicating a stable, long-lived body of water rather than temporary flooding — essentially a “vacation-style beach” that existed for tens of millions of years. * This discovery suggests Mars once had a complex water system with rivers, waves, and ocean currents that could...

Trump: "Elon's gonna go into orbit soon. He's going to go to Mars." Musk: "They ask me: Do you wanna die on Mars? And I say, 'Well, yes, but not on impact.'"

After Apollo NASA conducted a set of studies for a manned mission around Mars. More than half a century later, we are still far from the goal of sending people to our planetary neighbors. But sometimes the most interesting history is the history of what might have been. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.Forgotten Manned Mars Mission Plans | 14:50The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered | 1.51M subscribers | 99,307 views | January 20, 2025

I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It! (I Spent The Day Reading The ‘USAID’ Payments Log - this is a weird one to fight global 10:32 warming on Mars now this is not a joke 10:36 this was 22 million dollar for climate 10:39 change resilience for Mars

The internet is once again going crazy with conspiracy theories after an image of a perfect 'square structure' was found on the surface of Mars. So grab your tinfoil hats, as it's time to investigate further. One of our closest planetary neighbours and likely the best contender to support human life in our solar system (after Earth, of course), Mars has long been a source of major fascination for humans. Major Hollywood blockbusters have seen humanity colonise it, H.G. Wells made it the home of hostile invaders and Donald Trump has even promised to plant the US flag on it....

In the annals of space exploration history, a curious coincidence recently captured the imagination of science enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists alike. On January 27, a social media claim went viral, alleging that Wernher von Braun, the famed German-American rocket scientist, had predicted a leader named “Elon” would guide humanity’s colonization of Mars. This claim originates from a passage in The Mars Project, an obscure science fiction book by von Braun in 1948. The seemingly uncanny coincidence sparked speculation that von Braun had somehow anticipated the rise of Elon Musk—SpaceX CEO, entrepreneur, and outspoken advocate for Mars colonization. At first glance,...

Conventional jet engines generate thrust by mixing fuel with compressed air, then igniting it. As the burning mixture rapidly expands, it gets blasted out of the back of the engine, propelling the craft forward. On the other hand, a plasma jet engine does away with the standard air and fuel mixture. Instead, it makes use of electricity to compress and excite gas into a plasma — an extremely hot, dense ionised state comparable with the insides of a fusion reactor or a star — then generate an electromagnetic field from it. Plasma engines have remained in experimental stages for quite...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Flying saucers may soon be more fact than mere science fiction. University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Roy has submitted a patent application for a circular, spinning aircraft design reminiscent of the spaceships seen in countless Hollywood films. Roy, however, calls his design a “wingless electromagnetic air vehicle,” or WEAV. The proposed prototype is small – the aircraft will measure less than six inches across – and will be efficient enough to be powered by on-board batteries. Roy said the design can be scaled up and theoretically should work in a much larger...

Imagine a car that accelerates from zero to sixty in 250 feet, and then rockets to 120 miles per hour in just one more inch. That's essentially what a collaboration of accelerator physicists has accomplished, using electrons for their racecars and plasma for the afterburners. Because electrons already travel at near light's speed in an accelerator, the physicists actually doubled the energy of the electrons, not their speed. The researchers—from the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering—published their...

The 'double layer thruster' is a new kind of ion drive which could give much more power than existing versions. It works by accelerating charged particles between two layers of argon plasma, gas where the atoms have been stripped of electrons. Esa says it has 'proven the principle', and will proceed with simulations and perhaps bigger prototypes. Esa already uses an ion drive on its Smart 1 Moon probe, and the US space agency Nasa deployed one on Deep Space 1, which flew out to Comet Borrelly in 2001.

A team of engineers and scientists led by NASA have begun investigating the physics and performance of magnetic nozzles -- innovative devices that could support development of plasma-based propulsion systems.

SEATTLE – Sitting in the cramped coach section of a transcontinental airliner for five or six hours can be trying enough. But consider NASA's "reference mission" to Mars. Astronauts will be cooped up in their craft for up to six months each way as they travel to and from the Red Planet. Robert Winglee and his colleagues would like to give these future explorers a break. Inspired by the sun's influence on Earth, the team is developing a unique approach to space propulsion. The craft it envisions hurtles through space on sails made of magnetic fields. The sails billow under...

Anew type of nuclear thermal propulsion reactor fuel has been successfully tested at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, with hopes that the fuel could take humans to Mars in the not-too-distant future. Getting to the Red Planet, as things currently stand, will be a long-haul mission. Mars is, on average, 140 million miles from Earth. "Rather than a three-day lunar trip, astronauts bound for Mars would be leaving our planet for roughly three years," NASA explains, adding that such a mission would require the crew to be self-sufficient for long periods of the trip. "Facing a communication delay of up...

Led by Jacob Kegerreis, the team's new study revealed that a rogue asteroid may have passed too close to Mars. During its flyby, Mars' strong gravitational pull would have disrupted, or ripped apart, the asteroid, leading to hundreds of thousands of small rocky fragments orbiting Mars.While more than half of the fragments created from the disruption event are believed to have been ejected away from Mars, those trapped within the planet's orbit would have continued to collide, creating more debris. After these collisions stopped and the fragments settled into a ring around Mars, the material within the rings likely began...

... Orion's reentry followed a sharply angled trajectory, during which the capsule fell at an incredible speed before deploying three red and white parachutes. As the mission finished its trip of over 270,000 miles (435,000 kilometers), it looked to those on the deck of the USS Portland like the capsule had made it home in a single piece. As the recovery crew lifted Orion to the carrier's deck, shock waves ruffled across the capsule's surface. That's when crew members started to spot big cracks on Orion's lower surface, where the capsule's exterior bonds to its heat shield. But why wouldn't...

The review takes a close look the final flight of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which was the first aircraft to fly on another world.Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and AeroVironment are completing a detailed assessment of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s final flight on Jan. 18, 2024, which will be published in the next few weeks as a NASA technical report. Designed as a technology demonstration to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity was the first aircraft on another world. It operated for almost three years, performed 72 flights, and flew...

NASA today insisted stranded astronaut Sunita Williams is safe and healthy amid growing public concern for her health. But the space agency again refused to give any details about four astronauts who were mysteriously hospitalized late last month after returning from a separate space mission... A doctor raised concerns about Williams this week after a photo showed her looking 'gaunt', suggesting she had lost a significant amount of weight after spending more than 150 days stuck on the International Space Station.... Concern over Williams came less than two weeks after the hospitalization of four NASA/SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts, who splashed down...

SpaceX successfully landed its Starship rocket in what Elon Musk calls one of the company's most important launches. SpaceFund founder Rick Tumlinson joins Josh Lipton on Asking for a Trend to talk about what the landing means for SpaceX and the space exploration industry. The venture capital fund focused on space exploration is invested in SpaceX. "What we're witnessing here [is the] combination of the railroads, the steamships, airplanes, all in one. Like 100 years from now, people are going to look back at this period of time as sort of when humanity breaks out into space, Tumlinson says, adding...

This is an artist’s concept of an early Mars with liquid water (blue areas) on its surface. Ancient regions on Mars bear signs of abundant water – such as features resembling valleys and deltas, and minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water. Scientists think that billions of years ago, the atmosphere of Mars was much denser and warm enough to form rivers, lakes, and perhaps even oceans of water. As the planet cooled and lost its global magnetic field, the solar wind and solar storms eroded away to space a significant amount of the planet’s atmosphere, turning...