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As astronauts and engineers like to say, space is tough. But that has never stopped brilliant minds from dreaming big.
A Seattle company has revived NASA’s space plane plans, which were halted in 2001 due to technical problems. Radian Aerospace wants to replace vertical rocket launches with planes that launch into space on a rocket-powered sled. But such a reinvention won’t be easy.
Meanwhile, the fate of Boeing’s Starliner under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program — which will ultimately determine whether it becomes a spacecraft capable of one day carrying astronauts to low-Earth orbit — hangs in the balance.
The spacecraft successfully launched and delivered NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station in June. But what seemed like an eight-day journey turned into months of questions about Starliner’s ability to safely return the crew to Earth.
Problems with the booster rocket led NASA and Boeing to send the Starliner home without the two astronauts to complete the mission before going back to the drawing board.
Defying gravity
After nearly three months, the Starliner spacecraft returned to Earth without its two test pilots, after undocking from the space station on Friday evening and landing with a parachute in the New Mexico desert on Saturday morning.
Starliner is the first American-made capsule to land on the ground with a parachute, instead of splashing down in the ocean.
Wilmore and Williams saw their spacecraft take off and will remain in the space laboratory until 2025.
“There’s a part of us, all of us, that wishes it had gone the way we planned. We planned to land the mission with Butch and Suni on board,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Now that Starliner is back on Earth, Boeing engineers will study the spacecraft and determine what work needs to be done to fix the problems that arose during its first flight into space. It remains to be seen how and when Starliner will be certified to regularly carry astronauts into space.
Secrets of the Ocean
Researchers tagged a pregnant porbeagle shark off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to track her movements and see where she would give birth.
But five months later, her tag surfaced and the team realized a large predator had likely eaten the shark.
The investigation turned into a scientific murder mystery and in the waters where the porbeagle shark disappeared, two likely suspects emerged: the great white shark and the shortfin mako shark.
The discovery shows that shark behavior is more complex than previously thought. It is possible that large sharks hunting each other is a common behavior.
Wild kingdom
The Iberian lynx has come back from the brink of extinction after decades of conservation work. New technology could ensure that the Spanish lynx population has a long future.
Habitat loss, a decrease in food sources and traffic accidents were the biggest obstacles for the lynx. Subsequently, the European Union and the Spanish government funded a major project to restore habitats and prey.
But the Iberian lynx remains endangered. To prevent the cats from being run over on busy highways, conservationists are installing virtual fences equipped with sensors that use sound and light alarms. And in the future, scientists could design scent corridors that create artificial paths to connect different lynx populations.
Other worlds
New research suggests an asteroid 20 times larger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs may have struck Jupiter’s moon Ganymede 4 billion years ago.
The massive impact may have caused the moon, the largest in the solar system, to shift on its axis.
Astronomers could find more answers about Ganymede’s history and how the impact affected the ocean beneath its icy surface when the European Space Agency’s JUICE spacecraft lands on the moon in 2031 to conduct research.
Meanwhile, a small asteroid caused a flash this week as it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere over the Philippines, near the island of Luzon.
Curiosities
Researchers were able to watch the functioning of a mouse’s organs after temporarily making its skin transparent with a common substance: yellow food coloring mixed with water.
The scientists applied the mixture to the skin of the skulls and bellies of living mice. The team was then able to observe blood vessels directly on the surface of the brain, as well as muscle contractions that move food through the digestive tract.
When the light-absorbing dye mixes with water, the skin tissue’s ability to scatter light is suppressed.
The scientific breakthrough, similar to the plot of H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man,” could revolutionize biomedical research and make veins more visible for blood draws.
Discoveries
Grab your favorite morning coffee and enjoy this refreshing read:
— A team led by researchers from Cornell University has designed robots controlled by king oyster mushrooms, a feat that combines living organisms and machines.
— New photos taken at the Titanic site show just how much the 1912 shipwreck has deteriorated in recent years, and reveal the location of a surprisingly intact statue of a Roman goddess.
— An amateur archaeologist has unearthed an ancient, intricate kite-shaped ring that has been buried for more than 1,000 years at the site of a fort in northeastern Scotland.
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