At the time of impact, the impactor vehicle, about the size of a vending machine, was moving at about 14,000 mph.

After traveling for over a year, NASA‘s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which attempted to provide answers, “Could a specially crafted satellite be used to divert an asteroid from its planet-destroying course? How about a number? “has effectively impacted the Dimorphos asteroid. However, NASA ground control has confirmed that the DART impact vehicle has intercepted the target asteroid. The results and data from the collision are still being received. Yes, Dimorphos is about the size of a football stadium, but space is very big, extremely dark, and both the asteroid and the spaceship were traveling rather quickly at the time.

“It’s been a successful completion of the first part of the world’s first planetary defense test,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after the impact. “I believe it’s going to teach us how one day to protect our own planet from an incoming asteroid. We are showing that planetary defense is a global endeavor and it is very possible to save our planet.”

In an effort to investigate the employment of defensive satellites as a method of planetary defense against Near Earth Objects, NASA launched the DART mission in November 2021. Nearly 68 million miles from Earth, the DART impactor vehicle, about the size of a vending machine, tragically crossed Dimorphos’ path while traveling at about 14,000 MPH.

It remains to be seen if future generations of a planetary defense system will be packed with satellites ready to go full June Bug vs. Chrysler Windshield against real planet-killer asteroids. Dimorphos is one of two asteroids that are gravitationally entangled; its parent rock is more than five times larger than Dimorphos itself, but both are dwarfed by the space rock that struck Earth 66 million years ago and destroyed 75% of the planet’s multicellular life while gouging out the Gulf of Mexico.

The world of science and technology brings us yet another crazy possibility that’s going to be explored quite soon. Fourth Generation Cellular Networks are seeing implementations on various places. One of them could be the natural satellite orbiting the earth: The Moon.

A partnership between Nokia, Vodafone and Audi is looking to implement cellular networks on the moon sometime next year. Even if the proposition sounds crazy, it seems like they have a lot of plans to make this dream a reality.

Vodafone will be designing the lunar network and will make use of equipment designed by Nokia Bell Labs. This connectivity will allow two Audi Lunar Quattro rovers to communicate wirelessly with a base station at the Autonomous Landing and Navigation Module.

Using existing satellites, mission organizer Part Time Scientists will also be able to live stream scientific data and HD video content from the Moon to viewers on Earth. In other words, we will be getting some very detailed views of Earth for public viewing.

The networking equipment will be launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. If you think it’s going to be very heavy and sloppy to handle. Nokia’s engineers have worked really hard to make it weigh less than one kilogram.

We’re seeing the vestiges of life in the moon very frequently now. All thanks to the options becoming more and more accessible with the fast advancements in technology. Of course, this rapid growth is far from reaching its peak potential.

Who knows? Maybe we will be able to look at interplanetary travels and living. The sky is the limit when it comes to the amount of creations. Nowadays bizarre ideas like mobile networks in different planets aren’t that far fetched eiher.

It’s going to be an interesting ride, for sure. However, we must be also conscious about the planet we’re currently living in. Even though there are efforts to make this planet greener, there is a lot left to do.

Yesterday, on Halloween, scientists at the University of Warwick in the UK announced the discovery of a “monster planet.” No, it’s not a sentient planet (sorry fans of Mogo, Ego, and Unicron), but instead it throws everything we know about how planets form out the window.

This planet, officially called NGTS-1b, is a gas giant approximately the size of Jupiter that orbits a star 600 light-years away. Gas giants aren’t exactly unusual or uncommon — heck, we’ve got four of them in our Solar System — but NGTS-1b is unusual because its star is half the mass of the Sun. The distance between NGTS-1b and its star is 3% of the distance between Earth and the Sun. To put that into perspective, the Earth is approximately 93 million miles away from the Sun; Mercury is approximately 36 million miles away from the Sun, and NGTS-1b is 2.79 million miles away from its star. Also, the planet has 20% less mass than Jupiter, is believed to have a temperature of 530 degrees Celsius (compared to Jupiter’s 145 degrees Celsius), and completely orbits its star every 2.6 days — whereas Mercury’s orbits last 87.9 days.

According to current planetary formation theories, NGTS-1b’s star is too small to form gas giants and would only be capable of forming rocky planets. But, here we have a clear example of a star that shouldn’t have a gas giant having one. Lead author of the research team Dr. Daniel Bayliss made the following statement:

“The discovery of NGTS-1b was a complete surprise to us – such massive planets were not thought to exist around such small stars. This is the first exoplanet we have found with our new NGTS facility and we are already challenging the received wisdom of how planets form. Our challenge is to now find out how common these types of planets are in the Galaxy, and with the new NGTS facility we are well-placed to do just that.”

According to Professor Peter Wheatley from the University of Warwick, red M-dwarf stars are small and faint but are the most common stars in the universe, which means more monster planets like NGTS-1b could be out there, just waiting to be discovered. Only time will tell if these monster planets are common or if NGTS-1b is one of a kind.