Science, Space, Health & Robotics News - Page 55

SpaceX launched the rocket slated to be the transportation method that the first astronauts will use to walk on the surface of Mars.

It was only a few days ago I reported that Musk was planning on launching SpaceX's Starship this week, and that launch could have occurred on April 20 (4/20), a celebrated holiday by cannabis users and Elon Musk. The launch happened to land on the comical holiday, and Starship lifted off from its launch pad at SpaceX's seaside Starbase facility at Boca Chica Beach, South Texas, at 9:33 a.m EDT.

The 394-foot-tall rocket, the largest and most powerful ever built, was a sight to behold as it climbed in altitude thanks to its powerful 33 first-stage Raptor engines. However, only three minutes after liftoff Starship failed to separate from its Super Heavy booster, the first stage of the rocket. Since both parts of the vehicle were still attached, Starship began to tumble mid-flight, and approximately four minutes after takeoff, the 394-foot-tall rocket exploded, or as SpaceX likes to describe it, a "rapid unscheduled disassembly".

If you thought Elden Ring was hard on a standard controller, imagine trying to beat the game using a device that scans your brain signals and converts them to inputs.

Twitch streamer and psychology graduate Perrikaryal has attempted that very challenge, announcing that she was going to try and beat Elden Ring using nothing electroencephalogram (EEG), which monitors brain activity through sensor pads attached to her head. These sensor pads monitor her brain's electrical activity, and the device was trained to recognize specific states that were then bound to in-game inputs, such as the character's attack input.

Perrikaryal further explained how the device works and said the device can recognize what her brain activity looks like normally, when she is speaking to her viewers on stream, and when she is visualizing attacking or moving forward. For example, to move her character forward, Perrikaryal says she imagines pushing an object forward. The imaginary object doesn't need to be the same every time, but when the pushing motion is imagined, the in-game character responds within seconds, moving forward and then attacking an enemy.

College students from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will be sending the first US autonomous rover to the Moon.

The small rover called Iris was developed over three years by college students, faculty, and former students from the university. Over the course of NASA's 65 years of lunar exploration, the space agency has yet to land an autonomous rover on the surface of the Moon, but in May, as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, the 4.4-pound rover with wheels the size of bottle caps will begin its 60-hour-long mission exploring the surface of Moon.

What scientific operations will Iris be conducting on the Moon's surface? According to reports, Iris' mission involves taking a plethora of images of the lunar surface, mostly with the intention of capturing as much geological information as possible throughout its mission. Additionally, the small autonomous rover will be testing out new techniques for relaying its important data and photographs back to Earth. The small rover will launch on the United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket on May 4 alongside multiple lunar projects.

Two actively feeding supermassive black holes are on a slow collision course, according to recent observations made by astronomers and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers detailed the discovery in a new study, and according to the paper, the supermassive black hole collision took place in the early universe when it was just 3 billion years old. According to the Keck Observatory, researchers from the University of Illinois led the study, which has now been published in the scientific journal Nature. According to the study, the two supermassive black holes are embedded in their own galaxies, which are also colliding.

These two merging galaxies are called J0749+2255, and a faint variation in light detected by the Gaia telescope revealed there was much more going on than researchers initially anticipated. To get to the bottom of what was happening, researchers turned to a variety of different telescopes that observe the universe in different ways. The team used telescopes and arrays that observe in X-rays, radio, and optical light.

NASA has revealed the next director for its Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and at the swearing-in ceremony, fans noticed something peculiar about the book being used to take the oath.

NASA has taken to its blog to name Dr. Makenzie Lystrup as director of Goddard Space Flight Center. Lystrup will take over from Dave Mitchell effective immediately and will make history by becoming the very first female center director at Goddard. Before joining NASA, Lystrup was vice president and general manager of civil space at Ball Aerospace, where she was responsible for maintaining the company's portfolio of space systems across various scientific fields.

Within this position, Lystrup has made contributions to NASA endeavors such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Landsat 9, the Roman Space Telescope, and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). Looking at the above image, which was posted on NASA's website, NASA Watch's Keith Cowing spotted an interesting factoid. Lystrup was sworn in by NASA administrator Bill Nelson with her hand on a copy of Carl Sagan's 1994 "Pale Blue Dot" instead of a bible.

The milestone launch date is near for SpaceX's Starship, and if no new large problem presents itself between now and next week, we will see Starship attempt its very first orbital launch.

SpaceX has been preparing for this moment for quite some time, as development for Starship's first orbital flight test has been a strenuous road paved with many hindering issues. However, that road appears to be coming to an end as the company's CEO Elon Musk announced via his personal Twitter account that, based on development trends, Starship is eyeing its first orbital test for the third week of April - next week.

Musk has been talking about Starship's first orbital launch for months now, and in August 2022, the SpaceX CEO sat down for an interview on the Nelk Podcast, where he explained that Starship is the largest flying object ever made and that there is a real risk of the launch failing in a disappointing, but epic, explosion. Regardless of the possibilities of failure, movements at SpaceX's Starbase facility located in South Texas indicate the company is just about ready to give it their first crack as technicians last week stacked the Ship 24 upper-stage prototype on top of its Booster 7 first stage.

NASA's Webb space telescope has honed its extremely sensitive instruments on the seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus.

Uranus was deemed a top priority for investigation in the 2023-2033 Planetary Science and Astrobiology decadal survey, which aims at finding the most valuable holes in science and filling in those gaps with proposals for knowledge-gaining missions. NASA has now followed up on the requests of the survey by performing some quick observations on Uranus, revealing features of the planet that haven't been seen in a very long time. NASA has taken to its blog to explain the above image of Uranus that was captured with Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on February 6, 2023.

The image reveals a stunning view of Uranus' rings, with Webb's sensitive instruments managing to capture 11 out of the 13 known rings. Uranus is a unique planet in the solar system as it rotates on a roughly 90-degree angle, which causes the planet to experience extreme seasons as it goes through its long 84-year orbit around the Sun. NASA writes on its blog that because Uranus rotates on its side, one side of the planet's poles goes through years of sunlight while the other side remains in total darkness for an equal number of years.

It was only a few weeks ago that an Australian company cooked up a large meatball that was made using DNA from a wooly mammoth. Now, a competitor company in the cultured meat industry has revealed its upped the ante as its CEO has actually eaten a woolly mammoth burger.

Wooly mammoths were once one of the biggest animals to ever walk on the surface of Earth, and luckily for researchers, the remains of these giant creatures have been found encased in permafrost, resulting in many of their limbs, flesh, fur, and tissue being persevered. From these remains, researchers are able to extract the woolly mammoths' DNA sequence, which can then be combined with close relatives such as an elephant's DNA.

Australian lab-grown meat startup Vow combined the woolly mammoth myoglobin DNA sequence with elephant DNA and then inserted both into the cells of a sheep muscle. Researchers left the cells for several weeks, and they eventually grew into 400 grams of meat. It should be noted that myoglobins are the proteins of the meat, and in live animals, it stores oxygen, producing the red color that is seen in freshly cut meat. Interestingly, myoglobin proteins are responsible for the red color of the meat, not blood.

In a herculean effort, Caltech's Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization has created what has now been deemed the most detailed 3D map of Mars ever made.

The Global CTX Mosaic of Mars map comprises more than 110,000 images snapped by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) black-and-white Context Camera (CTX). Each pixel represents a staggering 270 square feet or 25 square meters, and the entire mosaic image contains 5.7 trillion pixels. NASA writes on its website that if this mosaic image was printed out, it would cover the entire Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.

The space agency explains that the new 3D map of the Red Planet took Caltech's Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization took six years to stitch together and tens of thousands of hours to develop. Not to mention the more than 120 peer-reviewed studies and scientific papers that were cited and implemented into its creation. The idea behind the map was to create an interactive experience that allowed anyone to explore the various different regions of Mars.

The strange phenomenon was captured on Monday, March 27, by photographer Valter Binotto, who managed to snap an incredible shot of the red ring that only appeared for a few milliseconds.

Binotto was stationed in the foothills of the Italian Alps when he snapped the above photograph of the phenomenon looming over what appears to be the small Italian town located in northern Italy called Possagno. However, the accurate location of the red ring wasn't above Possagno. Binotto's location when the photograph was taken has caused the image to create a forced perspective, a filming/photography technique that is used to create the visual illusion that objects appear larger, smaller, farther, or closer than they really are.

This technique was abundantly used through Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies to make characters such as Gimli the Dwarf and all the Hobbits appear smaller than they really are. As for the red ring, Spaceweather reports that it's called an ELVE, or an Emissions of Light and Very Low-Frequency Perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources.