Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 102

A paper on the objects titled "MeerKAT uncovers the physics of an Odd Radio Circle" has been accepted for publication into the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The mysterious glowing rings were discovered in 2019 using the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's (CSIRO) Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia. Dubbed odd radio circles (ORCs), they are likely to be enormous clouds of hot gas, spanning roughly a million light-years and originating around a central galaxy.

The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa has captured one of these ORCs in great detail. In the center of the ORC is a small spot of radio emission coinciding with a distant galaxy, which is believed to have generated the ORC. This video shows an artist impression of an ORC exploding from its central galaxy.

China's Tiangong space station aims to become a space tourism destination within a decade.

The space station is yet to be completed, but once finished will seek to accommodate visitors without formal astronaut training. China plans to launch six missions to complete the space station's construction this year, comprising two new module launches, two cargo supply missions, and two crewed missions.

Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut to reach space, told Chinese media that the general public's ability to tour Tiangong "is not a matter of technology but of demand" and that the space tourism ambitions "can be realized within a decade as long as there is such demand."

SpaceX is developing Earth's most powerful and tallest rocket, which is expected to be the transportation to the moon and eventually, Mars.

The next-generation rocket is called Starship and when fully equipped with the Super Heavy Booster that is comprised of 33 raptor engines it will stand at nearly 400 feet tall, making it largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Recently, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed on Twitter that SpaceX should have 39 flight ready Raptor 2 engines built by next month, which will be followed by another month of integrating them into Starship and finally an orbital test flight "hopefully" in May.

The SpaceX Twitter account recently published the above photos that showcase Starship fully stacked with Super Heavy docked at Starbase in its South Texas facility located near the Gulf Coast village of Boca Chica. While SpaceX are waiting on Raptor 2 engine development it is also waiting on the results from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) environmental review which is expected to be released no earlier than March 28.

Only a year after its discovery, Comet Leonard has made its perihelion, or its closest approach with the Sun, as of January 3, 2022.

Comet Leonard or C/2021 A1 was discovered by Gregory Leonard, a senior research specialist at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. According to Leonard, who spoke to EarthSky, the comet's main feature is the long tail that is comprised of charged particles that researchers call ions.

Since Leonard is mainly composed of ice as it was approaching the Sun, "the comet's tail began to show some complicated structure, possibly due to pieces breaking off the nucleus, revealing new areas that the sun would then heat," wrote EarthSky. The first confirmation about Leonard breaking up as it journeyed closer to the Sun came from Martin Masek and was then backed up by images released by the SLOOH telescope in Chile that showcased a streak across the sky of what once was Comet Leonard.

Earlier in March, UFO researcher Scott Waring shared his alleged discovery of a UFO hiding beneath the surface of the ocean.

Waring posted his "discovery" on UFOSightingsDaily.com, where he claimed to have discovered the UFO while he was "exploring" the Pacific Ocean on Google Earth. The researcher claims that the object is a 4.3 mile-wide UFO sitting at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Nazca, Peru. Waring connects the underwater UFO with the Nazca Lines in Peru, which are a group of geoglyphs etched in the soil of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru somewhere between 400 BC to 500 AD.

Researchers believe that the Nazca Lines were attempts at early civilizations communicating with gods, while other scientists believe they are physical representations of ancient astronomy. Waring believes the lines were used by ancient civilizations to contact alien life, but there is no solid proof to confirm that suggestion. As with most things "UFO," there is very little solid evidence to confirm anything, and Waring's latest update of an underwater UFO is no different.

On Monday, a flight carrying 132 people nose-dived towards the surface of Earth in Tengxian county in southwestern China.

The flight was identified as China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735, and the nose-dive was captured on video by a CCTV camera and a car dash-cam. The crash has marked the worst air disaster for China in nearly 30 decades as authorities were unable to identify any survivors at the wreckage. Now, Chinese authorities are saying that investigators are facing "a very high level of difficulty" in figuring out what caused the plane to nose-dive.

Zhu Tao, director of aviation safety at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), said on Tuesday, "The jet was seriously damaged during the crash, and investigations will face a very high level of difficulty." Adding, "Given the information currently available, we still do not have a clear assessment of the cause for the crash." Tao also added that the plane met all "airworthiness standards before taking off", and that during its descent, the pilots didn't respond to calls from air controllers.

NASA has announced it has discovered 5,000 exoplanets, which are planets orbiting stars beyond our own solar system.

The news was announced via a blog update on NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website, where the space agency explained for more than 30 years it has been on a journey of discovering what lies beyond our solar system. On March 21, the latest batch of now exoplanet data was received, adding 65 new exoplanets to the total that has now reached over 5,000.

The 5,000 confirmed exoplanets come in various shapes and forms as some include small, rocky worlds similar to Earth, while some others are gas giants like Jupiter and even "super-Earths", which are planets like Earth but much larger. Additionally, NASA writes that included in the 5,000 total are some exoplanets that orbit two stars at once and planets that are even orbiting the dead corpses of stars.

A series of "particularly dangerous" forest fires have broken out around the abandoned nuclear power plant Chernobyl.

According to a statement from Ukraine's parliament, at least seven forest fires have broken out around Chernobyl and have been spotted by satellites operated by the European Space Agency (ESA). The statement from the Ukrainian government blames the "armed aggression of the Russian Federation" for the fires, but doesn't specify what they were caused by.

Ukraine claims that fires such as the ones recently spotted at "particularly dangerous" within a 6.2 miles of the nuclear site, and that Ukrainian firefighters are unable to put the fires out due to the presence of Russian troops that took control of Chernobyl close to the beginning of the invasion. Additionally, Ukrainian officials have warned that Russia's invasion has interrupted attempts at monitoring the radiation levels in the failed reactor.

SpaceX is currently developing the world's most powerful and advanced rocket, and the company's CEO said when it will perform its first orbital test flight.

In response to a CNBC post on Twitter, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk replied by posting a series of tweets that were all updates on the Starship rocket and the Super Heavy booster. Musk took to Twitter on Monday and wrote that SpaceX will have 39 flight-worthy Raptor engines built by next month, and it will take another month to integrate those engines into the Super Heavy Booster.

For those that don't know, Starship, when equipped with a Super Heavy booster, stands at nearly 400 feet tall, making it the tallest and most powerful launch vehicle ever created. Starship is designed to be a reusable rocket that is capable of taking lots of cargo and people to the moon and even to Mars. SpaceX has already completed some high-altitude tests with Starship, but it hasn't reached space yet. According to Musk, Starship will attempt to reach space in May.

After suffering heavy losses Russia has turned towards upgrading its firepower, according to reports from Bloomberg and the Institute for the Study of War.

A recent assessment posted by the Institute for the Study of War revealed that Russian troops have begun to dig in its heels around cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa and more as the Russian military underestimated the level of Ukraine's defense. With heavy losses Russia has seemingly switched tactics by increasing its firepower which will likely mean more artillery strikes and missile strikes that will no doubt cause more civilian causalities.

Over the weekend Russia's Ministry of Defense announce the country had used Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, or dagger missiles which are a Russian nuclear-capable hypersonic aero-ballistic air-to-surface missile. Each missile has a range of more than 1,200 miles, reaches Mach 10, and is able to perform evasive manuevers throughout its flight towards its target. Russia followed up with another announcement on Sunday that stated it had used Kinzhal missiles to destroy a fuel depot in the Mykolaiv region.

NASA's Juno spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and has recently completed its 39th close flyby of the planet.

Juno only recently completed its approach with Jupiter as the spacecraft passed by on January 12 at approximately 38,000 miles away from the top of Jupiter's clouds. During its approach, Juno snapped several images of the southern hemisphere of Jupiter, with two moons to the right of the frame. NASA shared the image on March 16 and explained that by zooming in on the image, you can see Io on the left and Europa on the right.

On NASA's blog post, it wrote that Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system and that Europa is an icy moon surface that has an ocean of liquid water deep beneath its surface. NASA researchers have previously suggested that Europa's subsurface ocean may house some form of life. Juno will be making "the closest flyby of the enigmatic moon in decades," where it will be able to get a closer look at its surface with several of its scientific instruments.

Since Russia began its invasion into Ukraine and the West retaliated with heavy sanctions, the tension between the United States and the Kremlin rose, spilling over to the space program and the International Space Station.

The relationship between Russia's space agency, Roscosmos and NASA begun being strained when Roscosmos' chief Dmitry Rogozin started publishing subtle threats on Twitter towards the ISS, causing many to be concerned about the safety of the astronauts aboard the station. Rogozin posted videos of the ISS crashing, threatened to decouple the Russian segment of the station, and let the station crash into the United States.

Russian state-owned media recently published a spliced video that showcased Russian cosmonauts abandoning NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, which was later followed up by a statement from Roscosmos that pledged it wouldn't leave behind the astronaut and that it has never "let anybody doubt its reliability as a partner." Now, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet has spoken out about the future of the ISS, marking one of the first active astronauts to comment on the overall situation with Russia, Ukraine, and the ISS.

Two new studies of a solution to the paradox titled "Quantum hair and black hole information" and "Quantum Hair from Gravity" have been published in the journals Physics Letters B and Physical Review Letters, respectively.

Stephen Hawking proposed in 1976 that as black holes evaporate, they destroy the information about what formed them. This contradicts a fundamental law of quantum mechanics, which dictates any process in physics can be mathematically reversed. Black holes' lack of observable features aside from their total mass, spin, and charge led physicist John Archibald Wheeler in the 1960s to state "black holes have no hair," resulting in the no-hair theorem.

The first study now demonstrates that black holes have gravitational fields which contain information about their formation. When matter collapses into a black hole, an imprint is left behind in its gravitational field, referred to as a "quantum hair." The quantum hairs allow information about the black holes' formation to be retained, solving Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox.

It is the first time a Soyuz spacecraft has delivered only Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

The Soyuz MS-21 contained cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov, who launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 15:55 UTC on March 18th, 2022. The spacecraft is also the first to dock with the new Prichal module on the ISS, which was launched in November, 2021. They are the last crew members to join Expedition 66 and will transition into Expedition 67 when the remaining crew from Expedition 65 return to Earth.

Historically, Soyuz spacecraft headed to the ISS have always had at least one astronaut from outside Russia or another spaceflight participant. Another interesting twist to this recent arrival is the cosmonauts' spacesuits, primarily bright yellow with blue accents. Blue and yellow are the colors of Ukraine's flag and are a curious choice given Russia's current invasion of Ukraine.

The $75,000 robot dog is the infamous Spot, created by Boston Dynamics.

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) is the first fire department in the U.S. to have acquired the robot dog, but not the first emergency department to do so, nor the first in New York City. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) previously acquired some in 2021 but has since canceled its contract with Boston Dynamics after poor public reception.

The FDNY plans to use 70-pound (32 kilograms) Spot to assist in difficult search-and-rescue operations in a much less controversial application than the NYPD's use of them during raids. Captain Michael Leo of the FDNY's robotics team suggests that Hollywood has also contributed to the public's mistrust of robots.

A new study on the characteristics of such boring people titled "Boring People: Stereotype Characteristics, Interpersonal Attributions, and Social Reactions" has been published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Research by the University of Essex examined over five hundred people across five experiments, identifying the blandest jobs, hobbies, and places to live. They determined that the most boring person possible exists at the intersection of the most boring of all of those categories; a religious data entry worker who likes to watch TV and lives in a town.

In descending order, the five most boring jobs are data analysis, accounting, tax/insurance, cleaning, and banking. Conversely, the first move exciting jobs are: performing arts, science, journalism, health professional, and teaching. The five most boring hobbies were found to be: sleeping, religion, watching television, observing animals, and mathematics. Boring people were also perceived to live in small cities and towns rather than larger settlements.

The launch of the joint European-Russian mission had already been delayed from 2018, rescheduled for September 2022.

The Rosalind Franklin rover was built in collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos, to be launched to Mars for the ExoMars mission. However, a March 15th meeting of the ESA's 22 member states has resulted in suspending the scheduled launch aboard a Russian proton rocket. The move fits into the broader sanctions imposed on Russia by the EU following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The ExoMars rover has been designed to search for traces of life in Mars' atmosphere and under the planet's surface. The rover's original launch was scheduled originally for 2018 but was postponed to 2020 due to issues with its landing parachutes and was again delayed until September 2022. It was supposed to launch on Russia's Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The threat of nuclear weapons has reared its ugly head recently, with Russian President Vladimir Putin announcing his country's nuclear forces were placed on "high alert," but who else has them?

According to the Arms Control Association, the world has nine nuclear states: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It is estimated there are about 13,000 nuclear warheads in total, though this number is based only on publicly available information.

Following the Cold War, both the U.S. and Russia massively reduced their nuclear arsenals. The U.S. had a reported 31,225 nuclear weapons in 1967, down to 5,550 currently. In 1991, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had 35,000 nuclear weapons spread across thousands of sites in Eurasia, spanning eleven time zones. Now, Russia is down to 6,257 nuclear warheads, according to the Arms Control Association.

A new study on the evolutionary force titled "Global urban environmental change drives adaptation in white clover" in the journal Science.

The Global Urban Evolution Project (GLUE) has analyzed data from 160 cities across 26 countries from samples of white clover plants found in those cities and rural areas. The researchers behind the project found that humans in general, particularly cities, are a dominant force driving evolution globally. They found the white clover to be frequently evolving in response to environmental changes in its urban surroundings.

The researchers were able to identify evolutionary adaptations associated with cities, as they found the environmental conditions in cities tended to be more similar to between cities than those between a city and its surrounding rural habitat. For example, they found that white clover growing in cities produces less hydrogen cyanide, used as a defense mechanism, than in its rural counterparts after repeated adaptation to the urban environment.

NASA has uploaded a new blog post addressing frequently asked questions about the International Space Station (ISS).

The blog post describes all the countries and their respective space agencies involved in the operation of the ISS. It also describes the ISS's interdependencies, highlighting a long list of examples of essential capabilities controlled or enabled by Russian technology on board. For example, all of the space station's propulsion is handled by the Russian Segment of the ISS, with the propellant supplied by the Russian Progress cargo spacecraft.

The space station requires continual hands-on maintenance by its crew to continue operating in the U.S Operating Segment and Russian Segment. NASA astronauts and Roscosmos cosmonauts are not trained to operate the others' segment without assistance. In the event of a failure scenario in either segment, only its respective crew would be able to respond to it fully.