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Mars reaches opposition today, Oct. 13, offering skywatchers an early Halloween treat. During opposition, Mars, Earth and the sun form a straight line, with Earth in the middle. As a result, the Red Planet appears bigger, brighter and redder than usual — and the planet won't get this close to Earth again until 2035, according to a statement from Sky & Telescope. While Mars will be at its maximum apparent size when viewed through a telescope, the Red Planet actually made its closest approach to Earth last week, on Oct. 6, when the two planets were separated by just 38.6...

Before humans first started sending objects into Earth orbit, the pocket of space around our planet was clear and clean. But the launch of Sputnik 1 in October of 1957 changed everything. Since then, the space debris has been accumulating, with the amount of useless, defunct satellites vastly outnumbering the operational objects in our orbit. A new annual report from the European Space Agency (ESA) has found that while we have become aware of the problem and taken steps in recent years to mitigate it, those steps are currently not keeping up with the sheer scale of space junk. All...

trumpwarroom GROSS! #JoeBiden removed his face mask to cough into his hand. #trump2020 #maga View all 1,784 comments

Explanation: What would it be like to land on an asteroid? Although no human has yet done it, NASA's robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to attempt to touch the surface of asteroid 101955 Bennu next week. The goal is to collect a sample from the nearby minor planet for return to Earth for a detailed analysis in 2023. The featured video shows what it looks like to descend toward the 500-meter diamond-shaped asteroid, based on a digital map of Bennu's rocky surface constructed from image and surface data taken by OSIRIS-REx over the past 1.5 years. The video begins by...

Now they tell us! After pushing lockdowns around the world for months, the World Health Organization has reversed course. WHO’s special envoy on COVID-19, David Nabarro, said in a recent interview, “We really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method.

Instead of a cosmic rock, the newly discovered object appears to be an old rocket from a failed moon-landing mission 54 years ago that's finally making its way back home, according to NASA's leading asteroid expert. Observations should help nail its identity. 2020 SO, as it is formally known, is actually the Centaur upper rocket stage that successfully propelled NASA's Surveyor 2 lander to the moon in 1966 before it was discarded. The lander ended up crashing into the moon after one of its thrusters failed to ignite on the way there. The rocket, meanwhile, swept past the moon and...

Stephen Maciejewski dropped to a knee on a Center City sidewalk Wednesday morning and gently scooped up a yellow-billed cuckoo that had smashed into a skyscraper and died on its way to Central America or the West Indies. “This probably happened yesterday,” said Maciejewski, a 71-year-old retired social worker and volunteer for Audubon Pennsylvania. He labeled a plastic bag with the time, date, and location, tucked the slim migrator into it, and continued his rounds. Maciejewski gets emotional when he speaks about all the birds he finds, but nothing, he says, prepared him for what happened Friday. “So many birds...

It was one week after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 when envelopes containing a white powder began showing up at random locations in four states; among them, a newspaper office in Florida, the Washington D.C. office of then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, NBC News and the New York Post. The white powder turned out to be anthrax spores, engineered to be readily dispersed and inhaled – a potentially deadly bioterrorism weapon.Anthrax infections are treated with antibiotics. There are two that are most effective; ciprofloxacin and doxycycline.At that time, I was the CEO of a small pharmaceutical company that represented foreign...

Wearable sensors are evolving from watches and electrodes to bendable devices that provide far more precise biometric measurements and comfort for users. Now, an international team of researchers has taken the evolution one step further by printing sensors directly on human skin without the use of heat. Led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, the team published their results in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Cheng and his colleagues previously developed flexible printed circuit boards for use in wearable sensors, but printing directly on skin has been...

In just a few days, NASA is going to bounce its probe OSIRIS-REx off asteroid Bennu. The mission will collect a sample from the asteroid, and return it to Earth for closer study - one of the first missions of its kind. That return sample will help us to understand not just asteroids, but the earliest days of the Solar System's existence. However, that is not the sole mission of OSIRIS-REx. The probe arrived in Bennu orbit in December of 2018, and since that time has been using its suite of instruments to learn as much as it can about...

Here’s a classic display of Democrat’s emphasis on adhering to the letter of the law rather than the intent: Now who looks too stupid to “follow the science” with regards to the spread of the cooties? And this, even after Jake Tapper took the effort of schooling Joey on the CDC’s proper coughing technique: So I’m awarding this honorary degree to Joey “I’d-be-delighted-to-compare-my-IQ-to-yours” Biden for general proficiency in the subject matter, as well as for his uncanny ability for completely missing the concept. Winner of the 2020 Joe Biden “Ass Hattery” Award Why wouldn’t you want to  turn the keys...

Was Christopher Columbus born in Genoa, Italy? Most definitely not, say an unlikely collection of experts from European royalty, DNA science, university scholars, even Columbus's own living family. This ground breaking documentary follows a trail of proof to show he might have been much more than we know.Who Was The Real Christopher Columbus? | Secrets and Lies of Christopher Columbus | Timeline

Roger Penrose’s theoretical work demonstrated the objects could form. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez independently discovered a supermassive one at the center of the Milky Way. Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez are to be awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical and observational work on black holes, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday. Penrose will receive half the 10 million Swedish krona (roughly $1.1 million) prize; Ghez and Genzel will share the other half. Penrose, of the University of Oxford, helped place the previously idealized concept of a black hole on sound...

Explanation: Look to the east just after sunset tonight and you'll see a most impressive Mars. Tonight, Mars will appear its biggest and brightest of the year, as Earth passes closer to the red planet than it has in over two years -- and will be again for another two years. In a week, Mars will be almost as bright -- but at opposition, meaning that it will be directly opposite the Sun. Due to the slightly oval shape of the orbits of Mars and Earth, closest approach and opposition occur on slightly different days. The featured image sequence shows...

JACINTA BOWLER 5 OCTOBER 2020 Mars, our second closest cosmic cousin, has been in our collective imagination for decades. Between fantasies of martian visits and the promise of water under its icy surface, Mars doesn't need to do much to be in our collective good books. But very soon, Mars is not just going to be close to our hearts, but also nearest to our actual planet - a mere 62.1 million kilometres (38.6 million miles) away from Earth. This is the closest it'll be for the next 15 years. And it means that stargazing is highly recommended as Mars...

In its 4.5 billion year history, Earth has had to run the gauntlet. Numerous catastrophes have imperilled the planet, from massive impacts, to volcanic conflagrations, to frigid episodes of snowball Earth. Yet life persists. Among all of the hazards that threaten a planet, the most potentially calamitous might be a nearby star exploding as a supernova. When a massive enough star reaches the end of its life, it explodes as a supernova (SN). The hyper-energetic explosion can light up the sky for months, turning night into day for any planets close enough. If a planet is too close, it will...

This one is a video, at link. Explanation: Does the Sun change as it rotates? Yes, and the changes can vary from subtle to dramatic. In the featured time-lapse sequences, our Sun -- as imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory -- is shown rotating though an entire month in 2014. In the large image on the left, the solar chromosphere is depicted in ultraviolet light, while the smaller and lighter image to its upper right simultaneously shows the more familiar solar photosphere in visible light. The rest of the inset six Sun images highlight X-ray emission by relatively rare iron...

While we often discuss expansion into the Solar System as a step leading to interstellar flight, the movement into space has its dark side, as author Daniel Deudney argues in a new book. As Kenneth Roy points out in the review that follows, it behooves everyone involved in space studies to understand what the counter-arguments are. Ken is a newly retired professional engineer who is currently living amidst, as he puts it, “the relics of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” His professional career involved working for various Department of Energy (DOE) contractors in the fields of fire protection...

In its 4.5 billion year history, Earth has had to run the gauntlet. Numerous catastrophes have imperilled the planet, from massive impacts, to volcanic conflagrations, to frigid episodes of snowball Earth. Yet life persists. Among all of the hazards that threaten a planet, the most potentially calamitous might be a nearby star exploding as a supernova. Whan a massive enough star reaches the end of its life, it explodes as a supernova. The hyper-energetic explosion can light up the sky for months, turning night into day for any planets close enough. If a planet is too close, it will be...

A superbolide was recorded flying over the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, Brazil on October 1, 2020. Trajectory Preliminary analyses show that the very bright fireball began to shine at about 89.5 km over the rural area to the east of Caxias do Sul and travelled north, at 16.9 km/s (60,900 km/h) at an entrance angle of 44° to the ground The bight meteor disintegrated during 6 seconds, easily overcoming the full moon’s brightness and finally exploded at an altitude of 22 km over the city of Vacaria, also in Rio Grande do Sul state. A...