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Illustration depicting NASA's Perseverance rover operating on the surface of Mars (Image Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA's next Mars rover just cleared a big hurdle on the path toward its planned launch next week.The $2.7 billion Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission passed its flight readiness review (FRR) Wednesday (July 22), keeping the mission on track to lift off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30, NASA officials announced. With Perseverance , its most complex Mars rover to date, NASA is opening a new chapter in the search for traces of ancient life on Mars.The launch of the new rover is scheduled to take place on 30 July 2020 at 13:50 CEST [11:50 UTC/7:50 am US EDT] on board an Atlas V launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Then, on 18 February 2021, it will land in Mars' Jezero crater.The German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is represented on the Mars 2020 mission science team and is involved in ...

Google  has become the latest high-profile firm to back India’s Reliance Jio  Platforms. The search giant is investing $4.5 billion for a 7.73% stake in the top Indian telecom network, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani said on Wednesday. The Alphabet-owned search engine has agreed to pay $4.5bn (£3.6bn) for a 7.7% stake in Jio Platforms.Reliance's billionaire owner Mukesh Ambani says the two companies will develop phones for 4G and 5G networks.Google joins a list of new investors in Jio that includes Facebook, Intel and Qualcomm."Google has empowered millions of Indians to access helpful information and, like Jio, is a force for change and innovation," Mr Ambani said in a statement to shareholders. For Google, this is the “first and biggest investment” from the recently announced $10-billion India fund, CEO Sundar Pichai said. The two companies will jointly develop an operating system for an entry-level smartphone that will support 5G and target India’s 350 milli...

Netflix  is testing a new low-cost subscription tier in India as the on-demand video streaming service looks to court more subscribers in Asia’s third-largest economy. The news about the new subscription plan being tested in India was first reported by AndroidPure, which revealed that Netflix has started rolling out a 'Mobile+' plan in India, priced at Rs 349. The plan reportedly allows HD streaming and supports viewing across mobile, tablet, and computer screens. Streaming on TV, however, is not supported.Netflix is testing a new Rs 349 low-cost subscription plan in India: All you need to know Netflix confirmed the news in an emailed statement:“We launched the mobile plan in India to make it easier for anyone with a smartphone to enjoy Netflix. We want to see if members like the added choice this offer brings. We’ll only roll it out long-term if they do." Netflix says that currently it is only testing the plan in India and will only roll out the plan to all after a 'l...

  Image Credits:  SpaceX SpaceX   and NASA are aiming to launch the first official operational mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon human-rated spacecraft sometime in September, the agency revealed via a media update this week. The launch had been tracking towards an August date, but the updated timeframe indicates “late September,” allowing time for the completion of the current Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission which will see astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley return to Earth using the SpaceX  spacecraft potentially as early as August 1. The Demo-2 mission, while it carried actual astronauts to the International Space Station, is actually the final step in the test and development phase of human-rating Crew Dragon and Falcon  9, meaning that they’ll then be qualified for regular service transporting astronauts in the eyes of NASA. Crew-1 is the first operational mission, meaning the first considered a standard part of SpaceX’s contract to provide regular astronaut ...

Time Dilation Definition :  Time dilation is the lengthening of the time interval between two events for an observer in an inertial frame that is moving with respect to the rest frame of the events (in which the events occur at the same location). A closely related phenomenon predicted by special relativity is the so-called twin paradox. Suppose one of two twins carrying a clock departs on a rocket ship from the other twin, an inertial observer, at a certain time, and they rejoin at a later time. In accordance with the time-dilation effect, the elapsed time on the clock of the twin on the rocket ship will be smaller than that of the inertial observer twin—i.e., the non-inertial twin will have aged less than the inertial observer twin when they rejoin. The time-dilation effect predicted by special relativity has been accurately confirmed by observations of the increased lifetime of unstable elementary particles traveling at nearly the speed of light. The clock paradox effect also ha...

What are Gravitational Waves? Gravitational waves are 'ripples' in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. Einstein's mathematics showed that massive accelerating objects (such as neutron stars or black holes orbiting each other) would disrupt space-time in such a way that 'waves' of undulating space-time would propagate in all directions away from the source. These cosmic ripples would travel at the speed of light, carrying with them information about their origins, as well as clues to the nature of gravity itself. The strongest gravitational waves are produced by cataclysmic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, and colliding neutron stars. Other waves are predicted to be caused by the rotation of neutron stars that are not perfect spheres, and possibly even the remnants of gravitational radiation cr...

Wave–particle duality is the concept in quantum mechanics that every particle or quantum entity may be described as either a particle or a wave. It expresses the inability of the classical concepts "particle" or "wave" to fully describe the behaviour of quantum-scale objects. Can we accurately describe light as exclusively a wave or just a particle? Are the two mutually exclusive? In this third part of his series on light and color, Colm Kelleher discusses wave-particle duality and its relationship to how we see light and, therefore, color. You look down and see a yellow pencil lying on your desk. Your eyes, and then your brain, are collecting all sorts of information about the pencil: its size, color, shape, distance, and more.  But, how exactly does this happen? The ancient Greeks were the first to think more or less scientifically about what light is and how vision works. Some Greek philosophers, including Plato and Pythagoras, thought that light originated in ou...

A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a star is dying.  Because no light can get out, people can't see black holes. They are invisible. Space telescopes with special tools can help find black holes. The special tools can see how stars that are very close to black holes act differently than other stars. Scientists think the smallest black holes formed when the universe began.  Stellar black holes are made when the center of a very big star falls in upon itself, or collapses. When this happens, it causes a supernova. A supernova is an exploding star that blasts part of the star into space. Scientists think supermassive black holes were made at the same time as the galaxy they are Black holes are among the most destructive objects in the universe. Anything that gets too close to the central singularity of a black hole, be it an...

The Fermi Paradox seeks to answer the question of where the aliens are. Given that our star and Earth are part of a young planetary system compared to the rest of the universe — and that interstellar travel might be fairly easy to achieve — the theory says that Earth should have been visited by aliens already. S ome people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something.Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—” Where is everybody ?” On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars  and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us but what we are actually looking at is a very tiny patch of the Milky way galaxy.The observable universe is very vast and consists of more than     10 24  stars. Out of those 500 quintillion sun like stars a...

Why Mars? Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, being only larger than Mercury. In English, Mars carries the name of the Roman god of war and is often referred to as the "Red Planet".The latter refers to the effect of the iron oxide prevalent on Mars' surface, which gives it a reddish appearance distinctive among the astronomical bodies visible to the naked eye. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, with surface features reminiscent of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts and polar ice caps of Earth. Why Mars, and not another planet? After the Earth, Mars is the most habitable planet in our solar system due to several reasons: Its soil contains water to extract It isn’t too cold or too hot There is enough sunlight to use solar panels Gravity on Mars is 38% that of our Earth's, which is believed by many to be sufficient for the human body to adapt to. It has an atmosphere (albeit a t...

A solar probe built by the European Space Agency and NASA has delivered the closest photos ever taken of the sun's surface, revealing a landscape rife with thousands of tiny solar flares that scientists dubbed "campfires" and offering clues about the extreme heat of the outermost part of its atmosphere The spacecraft, launched from Florida in February, snapped the images in late May using the probe's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager as it orbited nearly 48 million miles (77 million km) from the sun's surface, or roughly halfway between the sun and Earth. The "campfires" are believed to be tiny explosions, called nanoflares, and could explain why the sun's outer shield, the corona, is 300 times hotter than the star's surface. Scientists are awaiting more data from the spacecraft's other instruments to know for sure. Scientists typically have relied upon Earth-based telescopes for close-ups of the sun's surface. But Earth's atmosphere limits ...

An artist’s illustration of the red supergiant Betelgeuse. Its surface in this view is covered by large starspots, which reduce its brightness. During their pulsations, such stars regularly release gas into their surroundings, which condenses into dust. (Image: © Graphics Department/MPIA) Betelgeuse is usually the tenth-brightest star in the night sky and, after Rigel, the second-brightest in the constellation of Orion. It is a distinctly reddish semiregular variable star whose apparent magnitude, varying between +0.0 and +1.6, has the widest range displayed by any first-magnitude star. At near-infrared wavelengths, Betelgeuse is the brightest star in the night sky. Its Bayer designation is α Orionis, Latinised to Alpha Orionis and abbreviated Alpha Ori or α Ori. Classified as a red supergiant of spectral type M1-2, Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye; imagined as being at the center of the Solar System, its surface would lie beyond the asteroid belt and i...

Antimatter: Antimatter is defined as matter which is composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding particles of 'ordinary' matter. Minuscule numbers of antiparticles are generated daily at particle accelerators – total production has been only a few nanograms and in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay, but only a tiny fraction of these have successfully been bound together in experiments to form anti-atoms. No macroscopic amount of antimatter has ever been assembled due to the extreme cost and difficulty of production and handling. In theory, a particle and its anti-particle have the same mass, but opposite electric charge and other differences in quantum numbers. For example, a proton has positive charge while an antiproton has negative charge. https://home.cern/science/physics/antimatter A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to v...

Expansion of the universe: The expansion of the universe is the increase in distance between any two given gravitationally unbound parts of the observable universe with time. It is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of space itself changes. The universe does not expand "into" anything and does not require space to exist "outside" it Big Rip: In physical cosmology, the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future. According to the standard model of cosmology the scale factor of the universe is known to be accelerating and, in the future era of cosmological constant dominance, will increase exponentially.  However, this expansion is similar for every moment of time (hence the exponential law – the expansio...