In The Gravity-Defying Design of the Caracal Cat, narrator Suranne Jones looks at the perfect design of the caracal, a wild cat, that allows it to leap upwards, defying gravity and catching birds in flight. Even more amazing is how the cat uses its flexible spine to twist its body two different ways so that it can push off itself and land on its feet no matter what. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Life in the Air, a documentary about animals that take to the sky.
The Mars Moons Exploration’s mission: grab a piece of one of Mars’s moons and bring it back to Earth. Talk about a big job! No wonder this is the first time anyone’s ever attempted this.
Our inner Solar System has only three moons: one for Earth and two for Mars. Mars may have two moons, but they’re both relatively small. The smaller moon, Deimos, is about 6 miles across. Phobos is around double that, but, at 12 miles across, its diameter is still closer to the distance to your local grocery store than the size of Earth’s Moon (which is over 2,000 miles across).
Scientists want to bring a sample from Phobos back to Earth, which should hopefully help answer the question: How exactly did these Mars moons form? One possibility is that a giant impact on early Mars blasted debris into space that later became the moons. Another is that Phobos and Deimos started as asteroids that were captured by Mars’s gravity.
Until now, the only pieces of Mars that scientists have been able to study fell to Earth as meteorites, but these types of samples become contaminated as they travel through our atmosphere. A piece taken directly from Phobos, however, would be pristine.
The plan is for the spacecraft to fly past Deimos, send a rover onto Phobos, and later land to collect a sample that is expected to return to Earth in 2031. After all this, researchers are expecting a whopping… 10 grams of material. That’s the same as about two nickels! But scientists say that is enough, especially because they would be able to do several studies on each grain of material.
The “global space economy” refers to pretty much everything having to do with human progress through space, including exploration, research, management, and use. It also generates hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
You may not have heard the term “global space economy,” but you’ve probably heard of at least two of the big players: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. As founders of Blue Origin and SpaceX, their companies are estimated to be worth $100 billion and $1.8 trillion, respectively. If you took 1.8 trillion standard dollar bills end-to-end, it would stretch 100 million miles — more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun! Imagine walking to the Sun on a bridge made of money! You couldn’t, because of all of the “zero gravity.” Your feet would also get very tired. There’s also no oxygen. But we know all of this because of how much we’ve studied space!
So why spend so much time and money on the space industry, which has expanded massively in the last few decades? Don’t only a few select astronauts go to space? Shouldn’t we be focusing on Earth? Well, what we learn in space has a big impact on what we do on the ground. Our findings from space show up as the GPS on our phones, in ships navigating the oceans, even as farmers using satellite photography to plan their crops.
There’s no sign of slowing down on the space front — the UK is focusing on small satellites, America is hoping to put astronauts back on the moon by 2028, and China is planning its own lunar landing by 2030. These explorations could provide valuable minerals, insight to getting past the Moon (like to Mars), and open up space tourism opportunities.
In The Gravity-Defying Design of the Caracal Cat, narrator Suranne Jones looks at the perfect design of the caracal, a wild cat, that allows it to leap upwards, defying gravity and catching birds in flight. Even more amazing is how the cat uses its flexible spine to twist its body two different ways so that it can push off itself and land on its feet no matter what. This video is excerpted from BBC’s Life in the Air, a documentary about animals that take to the sky.
The Mars Moons Exploration’s mission: grab a piece of one of Mars’s moons and bring it back to Earth. Talk about a big job! No wonder this is the first time anyone’s ever attempted this.
Our inner Solar System has only three moons: one for Earth and two for Mars. Mars may have two moons, but they’re both relatively small. The smaller moon, Deimos, is about 6 miles across. Phobos is around double that, but, at 12 miles across, its diameter is still closer to the distance to your local grocery store than the size of Earth’s Moon (which is over 2,000 miles across).
Scientists want to bring a sample from Phobos back to Earth, which should hopefully help answer the question: How exactly did these Mars moons form? One possibility is that a giant impact on early Mars blasted debris into space that later became the moons. Another is that Phobos and Deimos started as asteroids that were captured by Mars’s gravity.
Until now, the only pieces of Mars that scientists have been able to study fell to Earth as meteorites, but these types of samples become contaminated as they travel through our atmosphere. A piece taken directly from Phobos, however, would be pristine.
The plan is for the spacecraft to fly past Deimos, send a rover onto Phobos, and later land to collect a sample that is expected to return to Earth in 2031. After all this, researchers are expecting a whopping… 10 grams of material. That’s the same as about two nickels! But scientists say that is enough, especially because they would be able to do several studies on each grain of material.
The “global space economy” refers to pretty much everything having to do with human progress through space, including exploration, research, management, and use. It also generates hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
You may not have heard the term “global space economy,” but you’ve probably heard of at least two of the big players: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. As founders of Blue Origin and SpaceX, their companies are estimated to be worth $100 billion and $1.8 trillion, respectively. If you took 1.8 trillion standard dollar bills end-to-end, it would stretch 100 million miles — more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun! Imagine walking to the Sun on a bridge made of money! You couldn’t, because of all of the “zero gravity.” Your feet would also get very tired. There’s also no oxygen. But we know all of this because of how much we’ve studied space!
So why spend so much time and money on the space industry, which has expanded massively in the last few decades? Don’t only a few select astronauts go to space? Shouldn’t we be focusing on Earth? Well, what we learn in space has a big impact on what we do on the ground. Our findings from space show up as the GPS on our phones, in ships navigating the oceans, even as farmers using satellite photography to plan their crops.
There’s no sign of slowing down on the space front — the UK is focusing on small satellites, America is hoping to put astronauts back on the moon by 2028, and China is planning its own lunar landing by 2030. These explorations could provide valuable minerals, insight to getting past the Moon (like to Mars), and open up space tourism opportunities.