South Stack Prehistoric Hut Circles and Settlement Telescopic Photoset 2, Holy Island, Holyhead, 30.7.19.








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Космический трэк пространственных событий Тайны Мира, НЛО пришельцы, наука, космос, древние, мегалиты, археология. Secrets, unknown, UFO aliens, science, space, ancient civilizations, megaliths, archeology
South Stack Prehistoric Hut Circles and Settlement Telescopic Photoset 2, Holy Island, Holyhead, 30.7.19.
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The Planetary Society logo.
August 1, 2019
LightSail 2 has managed to raise its altitude thanks to the pressure of solar radiation in orbit around the Earth.
Image above: The solar sail is a small satellite with a square of 32 square meters of thin film, light and reflective polyester Mylar.
The American organization Planetary Society announced Wednesday the success of the operation of its solar sail: already in orbit around the Earth, LightSail 2 has managed to raise its altitude thanks to the pressure of solar radiation.
The team behind the $ 7 million project said it has demonstrated a new form of propulsion that could one day transform distant space exploration. Because this bread-sized satellite equipped with a huge glossy polyester sail is powered neither by a motor, nor with the help of fuel or solar panels, but only by the pressure of the elusive photons of the Sun.
«Over the past four days, the spacecraft has climaxed, or its highest point in orbit, about 1.7 kilometers through its solar sail,» said Bruce Betts, LightSail 2 project manager.
It becomes the first ship to use a solar sail to propel itself into Earth orbit and the second solar sail to fly successfully after the Japanese Ikaros in 2010.
«We officially declared the success of the mission,» said Bill Nye, director of the Planetary Society, on Twitter. «This technology allows us to take objects to extraordinary destinations in the solar system, and perhaps beyond, in a way that was never possible because we do not need fuel or fuel control systems, «he said.
He added that he would like to see technology applied to missions such as the search for life on the planet Mars, on the icy moon of Jupiter, Europe, and Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. According to him, solar sails could «lower the cost of these missions».
Related article:
The solar sail LightSail 2 opened in space
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-solar-sail-lightsail-2-opened-in.html
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The Planetary Society: http://www.planetary.org/
Images, Text, Credits: AFP/The Planetary Society/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
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Like Batman and Robin or Holmes and Watson, combining complementary skills can make the ultimate team. A new approach to treating leukaemia puts this principle into action by harnessing the powers of two different types of cell. Leukaemia, cancer of white blood cells, is hard to treat. It often returns in people even after treatment, because rogue cells can hide in the bone marrow, evading detection. Researchers might have found a way to clear out even these crafty cancer cells, by joining blood platelets (green) onto stem cells (purple). The platelets can carry the cancer-fighting drugs, and the stem cells are expert navigators, able to home into the bone marrow and hunt out cancer cells. In experiments in mice, this combination treatment halted disease progression, and reduced disease recurrence, raising hope that it may one day help improve treatments for cancer patients.
Written by Anthony Lewis
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Plancheite | #Geology #GeologyPage #Mineral
Locality: Tantara Mine, Shinkolobwe, Katanga, Katanga (Shaba), DR Congo (Zaire), Africa
Dimensions: 13.5 × 8.2 × 2.8 cm
Photo Copyright © Crystal Classics
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Malachite | #Geology #GeologyPage #Mineral
Locality: Shilu Mine, Yangchun County, Yangjiang Prefecture, Guangdong Province, China (Peoples Republic)
Size: 19.7 × 15.3 × 5 cm
Photo Copyright © Viamineralia /e-rocks. com
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Elements in the Aftermath
Image Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO
Explanation: Massive stars spend their brief lives furiously burning nuclear fuel. Through fusion at extreme temperatures and densities surrounding the stellar core, nuclei of light elements ike Hydrogen and Helium are combined to heavier elements like Carbon, Oxygen, etc. in a progression which ends with Iron. So a supernova explosion, a massive star’s inevitable and spectacular demise, blasts back into space debris enriched in heavier elements to be incorporated into other stars and planets and people). This detailed false-color x-ray image from the orbiting Chandra Observatory shows such a hot, expanding stellar debris cloud about 36 light-years across. Cataloged as G292.0+1.8, this young supernova remnant is about 20,000 light-years distant toward the southern constellation Centaurus. Light from the inital supernova explosion reached Earth an estimated 1,600 years ago. Bluish colors highlight filaments of the mulitmillion degree gas which are exceptionally rich in Oxygen, Neon, and Magnesium. This enriching supernova also produced a pulsar in its aftermath, a rotating neutron star remnant of the collapsed stellar core. The stunning image was released as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190801.html
We all respond to different situations in our own way. And different groups of people respond to diseases uniquely, too. Investigating this quirk of natural variation in the 1950s, Baruch Blumberg – born on this day (28.7) in 1925 – began studying blood samples from around the world. In the 1960s he discovered a protein in the blood of one group that transpired to be part of hepatitis B’s outer layer. This was the first step in a series of revelations that earned Blumberg a share of the 1976 Nobel Prize and led to a blood test and vaccine that has prevented millions of cases of hepatitis B, and by extension avoided countless liver cancers, which are often caused by the virus. Blumberg continued to expand the frontiers of human health knowledge for decades more, and, not satisfied with transforming life on this planet, even led NASA’s research operations pondering biology beyond Earth.
Written by Anthony Lewis
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Named after the eponymous video game and comic book series, the Sonic Hedgehog gene (SHH) plays a role in adult stem cell division. In the bladder, SHH helps block cancer cells from growing, which prompts aggressive cancer cells to turn off the gene. A study looked at how they manage to do this and what happens when SHH is switched back on. Looking at cell DNA from bladder cancer patients, the team found that the SHH gene didn’t have any obvious flaws but found signs of DNA methylation, a process that can switch genes off. When human cancer cells were transplanted into mice, tumours developed (left two columns). However, mice treated with a drug that blocks methylation had less tumour growth and their cancers were less aggressive (right columns). In future, applying these insights about SHH and methylation to the clinic could help develop new treatments to manage more aggressive cancers.
Written by Gaëlle Coullon
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NASA — TESS Mission logo.
July 31, 2019
A piping hot planet discovered by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has pointed the way to additional worlds orbiting the same star, one of which is located in the star’s habitable zone. If made of rock, this planet may be around twice Earth’s size.
The new worlds orbit a star named GJ 357, an M-type dwarf about one-third the Sun’s mass and size and about 40% cooler that our star. The system is located 31 light-years away in the constellation Hydra. In February, TESS cameras caught the star dimming slightly every 3.9 days, revealing the presence of a transiting exoplanet — a world beyond our solar system — that passes across the face of its star during every orbit and briefly dims the star’s light.
Video above: Tour the GJ 357 system, located 31 light-years away in the constellation Hydra. Astronomers confirming a planet candidate identified by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite subsequently found two additional worlds orbiting the star. The outermost planet, GJ 357 d, is especially intriguing to scientists because it receives as much energy from its star as Mars does from the Sun. Video Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“In a way, these planets were hiding in measurements made at numerous observatories over many years,” said Rafael Luque, a doctoral student at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) on Tenerife who led the discovery team. “It took TESS to point us to an interesting star where we could uncover them.”
The transits TESS observed belong to GJ 357 b, a planet about 22% larger than Earth. It orbits 11 times closer to its star than Mercury does our Sun. This gives it an equilibrium temperature — calculated without accounting for the additional warming effects of a possible atmosphere — of around 490 degrees Fahrenheit (254 degrees Celsius).
“We describe GJ 357 b as a ‘hot Earth,’” explains co-author Enric Pallé, an astrophysicist at the IAC and Luque’s doctoral supervisor. “Although it cannot host life, it is noteworthy as the third-nearest transiting exoplanet known to date and one of the best rocky planets we have for measuring the composition of any atmosphere it may possess.”
But while researchers were looking at ground-based data to confirm the existence of the hot Earth, they uncovered two additional worlds. The farthest-known planet, named GJ 357 d, is especially intriguing.
Image above: This diagram shows the layout of the GJ 357 system. Planet d orbits within the star’s so-called habitable zone, the orbital region where liquid water can exist on a rocky planet’s surface. If it has a dense atmosphere, which will take future studies to determine, GJ 357 d could be warm enough to permit the presence of liquid water. Image Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith.
“GJ 357 d is located within the outer edge of its star’s habitable zone, where it receives about the same amount of stellar energy from its star as Mars does from the Sun,” said co-author Diana Kossakowski at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “If the planet has a dense atmosphere, which will take future studies to determine, it could trap enough heat to warm the planet and allow liquid water on its surface.”
Without an atmosphere, it has an equilibrium temperature of -64 F (-53 C), which would make the planet seem more glacial than habitable. The planet weighs at least 6.1 times Earth’s mass, and orbits the star every 55.7 days at a range about 20% of Earth’s distance from the Sun. The planet’s size and composition are unknown, but a rocky world with this mass would range from about one to two times Earth’s size.
Image above: This illustration shows one interpretation of what GJ 357 d may be like. Image Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith.
Even through TESS monitored the star for about a month, Luque’s team predicts any transit would have occurred outside the TESS observing window.
GJ 357 c, the middle planet, has a mass at least 3.4 times Earth’s, orbits the star every 9.1 days at a distance a bit more than twice that of the transiting planet, and has an equilibrium temperature around 260 F (127 C). TESS did not observe transits from this planet, which suggests its orbit is slightly tilted — perhaps by less than 1 degree — relative to the hot Earth’s orbit, so it never passes across the star from our perspective.
To confirm the presence of GJ 357 b and discover its neighbors, Luque and his colleagues turned to existing ground-based measurements of the star’s radial velocity, or the speed of its motion along our line of sight. An orbiting planet produces a gravitational tug on its star, which results in a small reflex motion that astronomers can detect through tiny color changes in the starlight. Astronomers have searched for planets around bright stars using radial velocity data for decades, and they often make these lengthy, precise observations publicly available for use by other astronomers.
Luque’s team examined ground-based data stretching back to 1998 from the European Southern Observatory and the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, among many others.
A paper describing the findings was published on Wednesday, July 31, in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available online.
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.
Related article:
NASA’s TESS Mission Scores ‘Hat Trick’ With 3 New Worlds
https://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.com/2019/07/nasas-tess-mission-scores-hat-trick.html
Related links:
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS): https://www.nasa.gov/tess-transiting-exoplanet-survey-satellite
Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC): http://www.iac.es/index.php?lang=en
Astronomy & Astrophysics: https://www.aanda.org/component/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/201935801
Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Rob Garner/Goddard Space Flight Center, by Francis Reddy.
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ROSCOSMOS — Russian Vehicles patch.
July 31, 2019
Image above: Russsia’s Progress 73 cargo craft launches on time from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station. Image Credit: Roscosmos.
Carrying almost three tons of food, fuel and supplies for the International Space Station crew, the unpiloted Russian Progress 73 cargo spacecraft launched at 8:10 a.m. EDT (5:10 p.m. Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
The resupply ship reached preliminary orbit and deployed its solar arrays and navigational antennas as planned. Following a 2-orbit rendezvous, the Russian cargo spacecraft will dock to the orbiting laboratory at 11:35 a.m. NASA Television coverage of rendezvous and docking will begin at 10:45 a.m.
Progress 73 will remain docked at the station for five months before departing in December for its deorbit in Earth’s atmosphere.
The Progress is the second of two cargo resupply ships delivering supplies to the six crewmembers aboard the space station this month. SpaceX’s cargo Dragon spacecraft attached to station on Saturday, July 27, two days after launching on a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Russian Progress Cargo Ship Reaches Station in Just Two Orbits
Traveling about 259 miles over northwest China, the unpiloted Russian Progress 73 cargo ship docked at 11:29 a.m. EDT to the Pirs docking compartment on the Russian segment of the complex.
Image above: This image from an external high definition video camera shows Russia’s Progress 73 resupply ship nearing its docking port on the space station. Image Credit: NASA TV.
In addition to the arrival of Progress today, the six crewmembers aboard the space station welcomed SpaceX’s cargo Dragon spacecraft on July 27, two days after launching on a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
On July 20, the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft arrived to the space station carrying NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and Luca Parmitano of ESA (European Space Agency) and Alexander Skvortsov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Their arrival restored the station’s crew complement to six. They joined NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Christina Koch and Expedition 60 Commander Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos.
Related links:
Expedition 60: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition60/index.html
Pirs Docking Compartment: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/pirs-docking-compartment
Launch and docking activities: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-tv-to-air-launch-docking-of-russian-space-station-cargo-ship
Space Station Research and Technology: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/index.html
International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Images (mentioned), Videos, Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia/Roscosmos/NASA TV/SciNews.
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Two galaxies are locked in a deadly embrace in this Hubble Space Telescope image. Once normal, sedate spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, this galactic pair has spent the past few hundred million years sparring. The clash is so violent that stars have been ripped from their host galaxies to form a streaming arc between the two.
The far-flung stars and streamers of gas stretch out into space, creating long tidal tails reminiscent of antennae (not visible in this close-up Hubble view). Clouds of gas blossom out in bright pink and red, surrounding the bright flashes of blue star-forming regions — some of which are partially obscured by dark patches of dust.
Hubble’s observations have uncovered over 1,000 bright, young star clusters bursting to life as a result of the head-on wreck. The sweeping spiral-like patterns, traced by bright blue star clusters, shows the result of a firestorm of star-birth activity, which was triggered by the collision. The rate of star formation is so high that the Antennae galaxies are said to be in a state of starburst, a period in which all of the gas within the galaxies is being used to form stars. This cannot last forever, and neither can the separate galaxies; eventually the nuclei will coalesce and the galaxies will begin their retirement together as one large elliptical galaxy.
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Sometimes the prevalence of an infectious disease in a population can be so high that medicating everyone, whether infected or not, may be the most effective means to combat its spread. Such an approach has been adopted to prevent malaria outbreaks, and now researchers have applied the concept to tackle scabies on a remote Fijian island. Before the treatment trial, approximately one third of the island’s population had scabies – a condition wherein tiny mites burrowing into the skin cause intensely itchy bumps (as seen on the person’s feet pictured) and which, if untreated, can lead to severe bacterial infections. Two years after a single treatment (or two treatments a week apart for confirmed scabies cases) the prevalence remains at just 3.6 percent. While treating perfectly healthy people isn’t generally advisable, these results suggest that under certain circumstances mass medication of a population may benefit healthy members in the long run.
Written by Ruth Williams
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Roman Watch Tower Foundations, Holyhead Mountain, Holy Island, Anglesey, North Wales, 30.7.19.
These foundations, although reworked and tidied, reveal a complex relationship between the Isle of Anglesey and the Roman occupation of Britain, in particular, Wales. Sat amidst an Iron Age Hill Fort, the watch tower was used to signal a warning of seafaring threats to a Roman fort.
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South Stack Prehistoric Hut Circles and Settlement Telescopic Photoset 1, South Stack, Anglesey, North Wales, 30.7.19.
I was able to photograph the prehistoric hut circles from a height for once to give a better outline of the sites.
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Соединение Юпитера ♃ и Сатурна ♄ 21 декабря 2020 16 : 30 по Гринвичу, 21 декабря 2020 года, состоится условное соединение Юпитера ♃ ...