"Your Dreams Are Yours To Pursue, They Are Beautiful, And You Can't Let Anyone Slow You Down." ~ Sky

I love this kind of news!

“Voyager Spacecraft Fires Up Thrusters for First Time Since 1980”

 NASA scientists have recently fired up the thrusters on the Voyager 1 Spacecraft - the farthest spacecraft from Earth - in an effort to reorient its antenna towards Earth.  Originally, scientists would have used the attitude control thrusters aboard the spacecraft to make the adjustments, however these have been wearing out during the voyage. Instead, NASA scientists tried using Voyager’s ‘trajectory correction maneuver’ thrusters, located on the back side of the spacecraft.  Since these hadn’t been fired in 27 years, engineers were thrilled when they received an answer 19 hours and 35 minutes later that the four thrusters had worked perfectly.  "The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all,“ said Todd Barber, a propulsion engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/us/voyager-1-thrusters-fired-first-time-since-1980/index.html

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScl)

An un-released remix of "Into the Light." 2004 7 additional remixes of C+E's Billboard Club Hit, including mixes by Dave Aude, Black Light Odyssey (Floria & DeGraff,) and Andres Oscuro are available on the: "Into the Light" - (Remixes) single at iTunes, Amazon and the C+E Shop.

Well-explained, as always! 😊

How Far Could A Human Travel In A Constantly-Accelerating Rocket Ship?

“Imagine that we could constantly accelerate at the same rate as Earth’s gravitational pull, 9.8 m/s2, indefinitely. While you’d initially speed up, you’ll rapidly approach the speed of light. Owing to Einstein’s Special Relativity, time will dilate and lengths will contract. As you continue to accelerate, the distances and travel times to faraway destinations will plummet. At the halfway mark, simply reverse your thrust to accelerate in the opposite direction for the remaining journey. “

If you wanted to travel to a star that was 100 light-years away, you might think it would take you at least 100 years to get there. That might be true from the perspective of someone who remains on Earth, but for an astronaut who journeyed there at close to the speed of light, Einstein’s Special Relativity tells you that it would take far less than a century of travel. In fact, if you could accelerate at a constant rate, you could pretty much reach anywhere you wanted within 15 billion light-years of us within a human lifetime.

I even went and did the math for you here. Don’t be afraid to see how far a human could travel if we had the dream technology to get us there!

The Pinwheel Galaxy has around a trillion stars, twice the number in the Milky Way. [6000 × 4690]

Ask Ethan: How Does Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Allow Us To Image A Black Hole?

“[The Event Horizon Telescope] uses VLBI. So what is interferometry and how was it employed by [the Event Horizon Telescope]? Seems like it was a key ingredient in producing the image of M87 but I have no idea how or why. Care to elucidate?”

If it were easy to network radio telescopes together across the world, we’d have produced an image of a black hole’s event horizon long ago. Well, it’s not easy at all, but it is at least possible! The technique that enabled it is known as VLBI: very-long-baseline interferometry. But there are some critical steps that aren’t very obvious that need to happen in order for this method to succeed. Remarkably, we learned how to do it and have successfully employed it, and the Event Horizon Telescope marks the first time we’ve ever been able to get an image with a telescope that’s effectively the size of planet Earth!

Come get the incredible science behind how the technique of VLBI enabled the Event Horizon Telescope to construct the first-ever image of a black hole’s event horizon!

Hubble Catches New Stars, Individually, Forming In Galaxies Beyond The Milky Way

“There are a massive variety of star-forming regions nearby, and Hubble’s new Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS) is now the sharpest, most comprehensive one ever.  By imaging 50 nearby, star-forming spiral and dwarf galaxies, astronomers can see how the galactic environment affects star-formation.”

Within galaxies, new stars are going to be formed from the existing population of gas. But how that gas collapses and forms stars, as well as the types, numbers, and locations of the stars that will arise, is highly dependent on the galactic environment into which they are born. Dwarf galaxies, for example, tend to form stars when a nearby gravitational interaction triggers them. These bursts occur periodically, leading to multiple populations of stars of different ages. Spirals, on the other hand, form their new stars mostly along the lines traced by their arms, where the dust and gas is densest. Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we’re capable of finding these stars and resolving them individually, using a combination of optical and ultraviolet data.

The best part? These are individually resolved stars from well outside our own galaxy: in 50 independent ones. Here’s what Hubble’s new LEGUS survey is revealing.

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Just published, Pathway to the Stars: Part 3, James Cooper! Woot! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K2B5WS3 #future #scififantasy #architect #pathwaytothestars #strongfemalelead #strongmalerolemodel #physiology #neuroscience #physics #theoreticalphysics #biotechnology #nanotechnology #longevity #CRISPR #politicalsciencefiction #matthewopdyke https://www.instagram.com/p/BpswVbAHJ5d/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=o8byncedd7qp

Must watch: ATB Future Memories (YouTube) https://youtu.be/QpLrjifXT1w https://www.instagram.com/p/BsPJ-vfH-Jr/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=zd40u6v4m410