Science News Roundup: NASA unveils new spacesuit prototypes for missions and more
Following is a summary of current science news briefs.
NASA unveils new spacesuit prototypes for missions
NASA on Tuesday showed off two new spacesuits tailored for future moonwalking astronauts, signaling development of a crucial component to the space agency's accelerated drive to return to the moon by 2024. Two NASA engineers strutted on a stage inside the agency's Washington, D.C. headquarters, donning the new spacesuits, modeling and doing squats and crunches in front of a crowd of students and reporters to reveal what the first zero-gravity space-wear under NASA's Artemis moon program would look like.
Trio wins economics Nobel for science-based poverty fight
U.S.-based economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday for work fighting poverty that has helped millions of children by favoring practical steps over theory. French-American Duflo becomes only the second woman to win the economics prize in its 50-year history, as well as the youngest at 46. She shared the award equally with Indian-born American Banerjee and Kremer, also of the United States.
Russia buries cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, first human to walk in space
Hundreds of Russians bade farewell to cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space, at a solemn funeral ceremony on Tuesday which culminated in a gun salute. The ceremony for Leonov, who died on Friday at the age of 85 after a long illness, was attended by Russia's defence minister and prominent space exploration figures including 89-year-old former U.S. astronaut Thomas Stafford.
Interstellar interloper is a comet resembling those in our solar system
The second interstellar object ever spotted passing through the solar system is a comet that appears quite like those formed in our neighborhood of the cosmos, providing fresh evidence that other planetary systems may be very similar to our own. Astronomers on Monday provided some of the first details about the comet now hurtling toward the sun, saying it has a solid nucleus with a radius of about six-tenths of a mile (1 km), a cloud-like structure of dust and gas emitted by the nucleus, the telltale tail of a comet and a reddish color.
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