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NASA's Mars orbiter MAVEN narrowly avoided whacking into Phobos this week. Cheers to a tiny form correction made a week agone, MAVEN missed the 18-mile-broad moon by about two and a half minutes on Monday, instead of scraping by with only vii seconds' separation in time. This course correction should be sufficient to prevent any further gamble of standoff with Phobos or anything else orbiting around Mars, for the remainder of MAVEN's lifetime.

After being delayed seven times in a row trying to launch EchoStar 23, SpaceX is gear up to give it a go for real. SpaceX simply appear that its Falcon 9 rocket volition carry EchoStar 23 into space next week. The satellite is existence launched to provide Tv circulate services over Brazil.

Blue Origin unveiled their new reusable heavy-lift rocket, christened the New Glenn. Information technology's supposed to tote 45 tons to LEO and 13 tons to a geostationary transfer orbit. For the next few years, the New Glenn volition be competing with the Falcon Heavy and NASA's Space Launch Organization on price, lift capacity and reliability in a domestic space race. Eric Berger of Ars Technica calls it a new golden era of heavy-lift booster evolution.

3D visualization of Ahuna Mons, based on Dawn data. Credit: Dawn Scientific discipline Team and NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC

Also, cryovolcanoes! Or really, cryovolcano in the singular, and it's on Ceres. Merely it might even exist an active cryovolcano, as in erupting correct at present as you lot read this. Ahuna Mons is now the closest active cryovolcano to the Sunday, from where it orbits between Mars and Jupiter.

Food for thought: The orbital distance of planets and moons predicts whether we'll come across cryovolcanism. Earth is in the Goldilocks zone effectually our sun — the liminal region that surrounds the snow line, where stellar irradiation tin can let a planet retain a freeze-thaw bicycle. There's always somewhere fully thawed on Globe, and then no pressure builds upwards below the ice. Hence, no terrestrial cryovolcanoes. On Ceres, the solitary cryovolcano is a mudpot that built itself upwards into a cone. Recently we got a crop of dazzler shots from Enceladus, which are geysers spraying dramatic plumes into infinite where they form role of Saturn'south E band. Could this inform our speculation on habitable exoplanets?

At present, about those fast radio bursts…

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are sudden, incredibly brilliant flashes of radio emissions that light up telescope viewfields for an instant, just like a really bright lightning commodities tin briefly plow nighttime into day. There have been seventeen FRBs always detected since we defenseless the starting time one ten years ago, and we're short on answers for the basic question of what the damn things are. Information technology's so far out of band that it'south a little similar the OMG particle, a unmarried proton of catholic origin that was going and so fast it had the effective kinetic energy of a line bulldoze. The first problem is that the FRBs' brightness temperature is x37 K. This is hotter than any known natural phenomenon, anywhere, ever.

"This ways that a hot surface would need to accept that temperature in lodge to radiate at the observed level," project lead Avi Loeb, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Gizmodo. "There is no known astronomical object that generates radio bursts at such a high brightness, which is tens of billions of times brighter than the known population of pulsars, for example."

Loeb and colleagues speculate that the source of the FRBs could exist an intelligent civilization. A laser pulse, of the kind that we want to use to transport the Breakthrough Starshot armada, could emit a radio outburst tightly clustered effectually a specific frequency. Co-ordinate to their report, such a laser pulse — from an implied Kardashev blazon I or even Dyson-sphere-making type 2 civilization capturing the entire stellar irradiation on their twice-World-sized planet, no less — could produce a wink that looks just similar the FRBs we run into.

aliens

It's crazy. I know. Loeb knows too. When asked in an interview whether he really believes that any fast radio bursts are due to aliens, he replied, "Science isn't a matter of belief, it's a thing of testify. Deciding what's likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. Information technology's worth putting ideas out in that location and letting the data exist the gauge."