Huge sphere spotted in front of the Sun🌕

Scientists and conspiracy theorists across the world have been left stunned after Nasa cameras picked up a mysterious blue sphere moving in front of the Sun.

The images, taken from Nasa's STEREO satellites which orbit the Sun, show the large spectacle in clear view - before it goes missing from other frames.

UFO fans fear it might be a ‘rogue planet’ on the loose in our solar system.Others fear it might be a huge Death Star-style UFO.

Nasa has clarified that sometimes the sensor that processes those images before they are sent back to us can get overloaded, corrupting the images and making things appear that weren’t really there. As such, the blue sphere that UFO watchers are getting excited about is not simply less exciting than it seems – actually it never existed at all.

Telescope images captured of the sun on Monday (March 12) show what appears to be a planet-size shadowy object tethered to the sun by a dark filament. In the image sequence, a burst of brightly lit material can be seen erupting from the sun's surface surrounding the dark object, after which the orb detaches from the sun and shoots out into space.

The footage, a composite of images captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory and processed by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has quickly garnered attention on YouTube, where viewers are suggesting it shows a UFO spacecraft refueling by sucking up solar plasma, or at the very least, the birth of a new planet.


However, according to NASA scientists, the feature is actually a little-understood, but frequently observed, type of solar activity called a "prominence," and the way it is situated beneath another solar feature gives it its otherworldy appearance.

Last Bits of Pluto Flyby Data Received on Earth🛰

The last bits of data collected during NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s speedy flyby of Pluto last year are back on Earth, scientists said Thursday, marking the official end of the probe’s prime mission.

It took more than a year for New Horizons to send back the 50-plus gigabits of data collected around the time the spacecraft zipped by Pluto and its five moons on July 14, 2015.

The data downlinks came down at an average of about 2,000 bits per second a fraction of the speed of a dial-up Internet connection and were interrupted as the spacecraft conducted maneuvers and as ground antennas were needed by other deep space missions.

The long wait for scientists was part of the plan, as officials knew the data stored aboard the probe’s recorders could only come back to Earth a little at a time.

The final data fragment from the LEISA spectral camera within New Horizons’ Ralph instrument arrived at mission control at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, at 5:48 a.m. EDT (0948 GMT) Tuesday. The downlink came via an antenna at NASA’s Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, NASA said in a statement Thursday.

It took five hours and eight minutes for the data stream to travel the 3.4-billion-mile (5.5-billion-kilometer) gulf from New Horizons to Earth.

Mission controllers will conduct a final data verification review before erasing the two data recorders aboard New Horizons, clearing room for future science observations from the spacecraft’s extended mission, which includes a close encounter with the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69.

The next target for New Horizons measures just 13 to 25 miles (21 to 40 kilometers) across, and experts believe 2014 MU69 is a relic building block from left over from the ancient solar system.

New Horizons will fly by the tiny world on Jan. 1, 2019, at a distance of about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) during an extended mission phase approved by NASA earlier this year.

Robot that can exercise and cool off in a similar way, inspired by human sweat🚹

A team from the University of Tokyo has created a robot that can exercise and cool off in a similar way, inspired by human sweat. The new robot is named Kengoro. It has arms, legs, and a head positioned like a human being and is human height: 1.7 meters (about 5.5 feet) tall. 

The research team was interested in creating a human-like robot, with similar physical capacities. But they soon realized that, for the robot to exercise like a human, it would need a cooling system. For human beings, that cooling system is perspiration. But robots usually require complicated water-cooling systems, which tend to be bulky, and would take up too much valuable space in the structure of the compactly Kengoro robot.

As we exercise, our bodies can produce a lot of heat as our muscles convert chemical energy into mechanical energy. To keep moving effectively during such conditions, we produce sweat to cool ourselves down. As the water in our sweat evaporates, it takes excess heat with it, allowing us to keep moving without overheating.

The team came up with a unique solution. Instead of using an active water pump to run liquid throughout the frame, the researchers designed the frame itself to become a passive distributor of deionized water. The researchers designed the porous "skeleton" of the robot to distribute the water throughout the frame in order to keep the heat from Kengoro's 108 motors to reasonable levels.

The secret is in the construction of the robot's aluminum frame. To create the robotic skeleton, the team used laser sintering, a process through which powdered metal is bonded together by lasers in a highly precise manner, similar to 3D printing. This allowed the researchers to precisely create a porous skeleton through which the deionized water would pass through a process the team calls "artificial perspiration." The water would pass through one layer of the skeleton gathering heat before seeping into an even more porous layer, from which it would evaporate, taking the heat with it.

This robotic sweating enables Kengoro to complete human-like exercises more efficiently. The robot was able to use the passive cooling system to do pushups for 11 minutes straight without overheating.

Kengoro's sweat, like many technological breakthroughs, is inspired by structures and phenomena already present in nature. The Christian Science Monitor recently reported a similarly nature-inspired "furry" wetsuit, which would allow surfers to stay warmer while using less material to do so.

Artificial perspiration has some drawbacks. While Kengoro can run for about half a day on a cup of deionized water, it needs to rehydrate in order to function for longer periods of time, much like humans have to do. 

New Shepard In-flight Escape Test🚀

New Shepard blasted off from Blue Origin's test range in west Texas at 11:36 a.m. EDT (1536 GMT), kicking off today's uncrewed test. About 45 seconds into flight, at an altitude of 16,000 feet (5,000 meters), the capsule fired its onboard "escape motor" for 2 seconds, blasting itself hundreds of feet clear of the booster.

Today's flight was the toughest trial yet, because it forced the capsule to "traverse twice through transonic velocities (the most difficult control region) during the acceleration burn and subsequent deceleration.

The New Shepard capsule landed softly under parachutes in the Texas desert as planned, raising a huge plume of dust as it hit the ground. And then, about 3 minutes later, the booster came in for its own touchdown, landing vertically on the launch pad.

The rocket's landing was a something of a surprise. Bezos predicted a fiery death for the rocket in his blog post last month, writing that the thrust from the escape motor would likely knock the booster off-kilter, causing it to crash and die in a massive fireball.

Today's test marked the fifth and final flight for this particular New Shepard rocket. In November 2015, the booster became the first ever to land after a space mission, and it has now repeated the feat four more times.