Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 106

Many publicly-available images of the Russian invasion into Ukraine are already live from various satellite operators.

Max Polyakov, the founder and CEO of Earth Observatory System Data Analytics (EOSDA), has recently appealed to satellite operators and space agencies worldwide to share their real-time satellite imagery with EOSDA to assist military and humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

The United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) has begun negotiating the historic treaty.

Almost 200 nations at the UNEA in Nairobi unanimously agreed to create an intergovernmental committee to negotiate and finalize a legally binding treaty regarding plastics by 2024. The treaty has been mandated to target plastic waste in all forms, including microplastics that insidiously work their way in the food chain and more.

A study on the association titled "Emotion-based Modeling of Mental Disorders on Social Media" has been submitted to arXiv.

Researchers from Dartmouth College have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that analyzes Reddit conversations to detect users' mental disorders. Their model focuses on emotions instead of the specific content of the text analyzed. The researchers say this is a more reliable approach to assessing mental disorders irrespective of the topics being discussed in the posts.

Their research focuses on emotional disorders such as major depressive, anxiety, and bipolar disorders, each characterized by distinct emotional patterns. Using publicly available data from Reddit, the researchers trained their AI model to map emotional transitions between different posts to create a map of how likely a user was to transition from a certain emotional state to another.

The head of Russia's space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, gave stark warnings during a recent interview against hacking any Russian satellites.

Dmitry Rogozin has been very vocal since Russia began its invasion into Ukraine, and as Western sanctions tightened Russia, Rogozin threatened to have the ISS deorbited. Now, Rogozin, the head of the Russian Roscosmos State Space Corporation, is responding to claims that Roscosmos' control center was hacked by a group affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous. According to Rogozin, "The information of these scammers and petty swindlers is not true," adding, "All our space activity control centers are operating normally."

Read more: Russia threatens to crash the ISS into US, top NASA official answers

The 19-year-old that was ushered into fame by creating a bot that tracks Elon Musk's jet has now created a bot that tracks Russian VIPs.

In early February, 19-year-old college student and aviation enthusiast Jack Sweeney landed himself in the limelight as Elon Musk offered to pay $5,000 to delete the Twitter account bot created by Sweeney. The Twitter account is ElonJet, and was created to track the take-off and landing locations of Elon Musk's private jet. The account is now nearing 400,000 followers, and now Sweeney has announced a new account called "PutinJet", which tracks the movements of Russian VIP jets and any Putin may use.

Read more: Elon Musk offers teen $5,000 to kill the Twitter bot tracking his jet

In 2020 a team of astronomers reported locating the closest black hole system at 1,000 light-years from Earth, but fellow researchers contested the results of the study and teamed up to produce a new study together.

The international team of astronomy researchers has published a new paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics that details the HR 6818 system with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. According to the paper, the HR 6818 system isn't a triple system that consists of one star orbiting a black hole every 40 days and a second star orbiting much wider as it was originally thought. It is actually a system that features two stars orbiting each other with no black hole.

The team used two of the VLT's instruments called GRAVITY and the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), and with the results, were able to conclude that HR 6819 is a binary system that features two stars and no black hole. The reasoning for the miscategorization is that astronomers originally observed the system when one of the stars was ripping the atmosphere off of its companion star, which is described as being much like a vampire drawing blood from its victim.

An employee that was working at a local electricity company has photographed a rare phenomenon described as "light pillars".

The photograph was taken by Mark Matwick, who is employed at the Keewatinohk Converter Station in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Matwick works at Manitoba Hydro, the operator of the electricity company, posted the photograph to its Linkedin account explaining the phenomenon. According to Manitoba Hydro, these mysterious beams of light are called "light pillars" and aren't "aliens descending", but occur "on a cold night without wind, the ice crystals that form in the atmosphere can act as a mirror and reflect the light source below."

In response to the photograph being posted on LinkedIn, Justin Anderson, an adept northern lights photographer and also one of the founders of the Manitoba Aurora and Astronomy Facebook page, spoke to CTV News Winnipeg and said that Matwick's image was "probably one of the best photos of light pillars I've ever seen." The full-time northern lights photographer backed up the explanation from Manitoba Hydro, saying, "It will reflect that light upwards into the atmosphere and it'll go hundreds of feet," he said. "It looks like hundreds of feet for us, but really it's going miles in the air and it looks incredible."

Russia recently began its invasion into Ukraine, and now Putin has decided to move more military into the country.

The U.S Earth Observatory company Maxar Technologies have released a collection of images snapped by satellites flying over the region. The images showcase a massive convoy of Russian troops and military vehicles that stretches 40 miles. The convoy of troops is moving near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, stretching from the town of Prybirsk, located in the north of the region near the border of Belarus, to the Antonov International Airport close to the capital.

Russia continues to push its military forces into Ukraine despite taking heavy losses at the hands of Ukrainian troops, and these recently released satellite images confirm the nation's intentions of furthering the attack. Reports also indicate that more troops and ground attack helicopters were spotted in southern Belarus, which is only 20 miles away from Ukraine's border.

China may not be willing to help Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, circumvent its sanctions.

Roscosmos Director-General Dmitry Rogozin expressed in recent tweets that its space industry would be continue in spite of recent sanctions banning exports of "sensitive technologies" by "spinning up fabrication of the necessary components and instruments ourselves." However, it seems they are unable to produce everything within Russian borders.

The Artemis program has already faced numerous delays, such as to its uncrewed Artemis 1 flight due early this year.

Following NASA's uncrewed Artemis 1 flight will eventually be a crewed Artemis flight that will see astronauts landing on the moon once again. However, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin has delivered an update on the program during a House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing on March 1st, saying the crewed mission likely won't happen any earlier than 2026.

The ominously named "doomsday plane" is a modified Boeing 747 called the Boeing E-4B.

Following Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent announcement of Russia's nuclear armament being put on high alert, the plane has taken to the skies for a training mission on February 28th. It took off from a U.S. Air Force base in Nebraska on a 4.5 hour flight to Chicago and back. The plane was also reportedly accompanied by several early-warning jets that are used to track ballistic missiles.

The E-4B plane is part of the United States Air Force, particularly a fleet of Nightwatch aircraft maintained by the U.S. military since the 1970s. It is resistant to nuclear weapons and is designed to serve as a mobile command headquarters for top-ranking military personnel in the event of nuclear war. The plane is equipped with analog equipment instead of digital, allowing it to operate in the event of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a nuclear blast.

A paper on the mission titled "Tomographic Muon Imaging of the Great Pyramid of Giza" has been submitted to arXiv.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one that has stood the test of time and still stands today. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the largest of the pyramids at Giza, and it will scientists will study it using cosmic-ray muons to see deep into the pyramid and map its internal structure. The effort is known as the Explore the Great Pyramid (EGP) mission.

Muons are elementary particles, similar to electrons but more massive. They can penetrate structures more deeply than even X-rays and thus are even more useful in tomography. Cosmic rays consist of high-energy protons and atomic nuclei from the sun and elsewhere in the galaxy, which arrive at Earth and collide with the atmosphere. When they do so, they produce various secondary particles, including muons.

The new study on face masks titled "Modelling the direct virus exposure risk associated with respiratory events" has been published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

An international team of researchers from Sweden, Italy, and Austria have developed a model that assesses the risk of spreading a given virus with and without an infected person wearing a face mask. Current recommendations regarding the transmission of infectious respiratory diseases are based on a simplified model developed by American scientist William Firth Wells in 1934.

The researchers incorporated many factors into their model to account for the true complexity of transmission. These include interpersonal distance, temperature, humidity, viral load, type of exhalation, and the use of face masks. They found that without a mask, talking can spread infectious particles up to a meter away, while cough can spread them up to three meters, and sneezing can spread them up to seven meters. However, masks dramatically reduce these figures.

NASA has announced it has awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX with three additional transportation missions to the ISS.

The new awards are a part of the NASA Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract, which will allow NASA to continue "uninterrupted US capability for human access to the space station", amid threats from the head of Russia's space agency. While NASA doesn't directly mention Russia and the comments from its space agency head, the announcement is definitely relatable as it shows that NASA is moving to rely on American-based companies to support science on the ISS.

For those who don't know, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, tweeted that "If you block cooperation with us, then who is going to save the ISS from an uncontrolled descent from orbit and then falling onto the territory of the United States or Europe?" In response to the statements from Russia's space agency head, NASA said, "The new export control measures will continue to allow U.S.-Russia civil space operations. No changes are planned to the agency's support for ongoing in-orbit and ground-station operations."

The Sixth Assessment Report comes from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report titled Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability was released on February 28th, 2022, and it is the second installment of the latest climate assessment by the IPCC. The previous installment focused on the recent climate science, whereas this installment examines the impacts climate change has on people and ecosystems. A third installment is due to follow, which will evaluate options for dealing with climate change and greenhouse-gas emissions in the future.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will return home after almost a year-long spaceflight.

Vande Hei came aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on April 9th, 2021, and is scheduled to return to Earth on March 30th. That would mark 355 consecutive days spent in space, breaking the record currently held by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who flew aboard the station for 340 days.

Vande Hei is scheduled to return to Earth from the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, an awkward predicament given the recent strong sanctions imposed on Russia, particularly its space program. NASA says civil space co-operation will continue between the U.S. and Russia, though the head of Roscosmos hasn't been as optimistic.

A study on the Earth's core titled "Superionic iron alloys and their seismic velocities in Earth's inner core" has been published in the journal Nature.

Scientists have thought of Earth's core to consist of a dense ball of solid iron alloy surrounded by a molten outer core. Computer simulations run as part of a new study suggest the inner core may instead exist in a "superionic state," where hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon molecules continuously swirl throughout a giant lattice of iron atoms.

The Mars Curiosity rover found the flower on February 25th, 2022, or Sol 3397 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, at 10:59:54 UTC.

The rover team confirmed that the flower-like object seen in the photo is a mineral formation formed from minerals precipitating from water. These kinds of structures are known as diagenetic crystal clusters, which Curiosity has spotted in the past. This latest example has been named the "Blackthorn Salt."

The image is a composite image made from two to eight images taken by the Curiosity rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm. The rover sometimes performs a focus merge on images like this one, where images of a subject that has been photographed at different focus positions are merged to bring all of its features into focus.

Russian troops invading Ukraine have reportedly destroyed the world's largest aircraft called the Antonov AN-225.

According to Ukrainian authorities, the world's largest aircraft, which was nicknamed "Mriya," or "dream" in Ukrainian, has unfortunately been destroyed while it was getting repairs done in a hanger at Hostomel airport that's located in the northwest of Ukraine's capital Kyiv. Russian invading forces reportedly attacked the area and destroyed the hanger along with the Antonov AN-225.

The aircraft features six engines, has a wingspan of 289 feet, and was originally constructed by transport Soviet space shuttles. The aircraft has been in operation since 1988 and also held the record for the largest and heaviest aircraft ever built, but furthermore, it also held the record for the heaviest single-item payload at 418,830 pounds and the heaviest payload ever lifted at 559,580 lbs. The Antonov company took to Twitter to announce that it couldn't verify the condition of the aircraft until it was "inspected by experts".

The head of Russia's space agency recently suggested that Russia could let the International Space Station plummet down to Earth.

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, recently stated that the sanctions on Russia recently implemented by the United States over Russia's invasion into Ukraine were blocking cooperation between the two nations. Rogozin tweeted that "If you block cooperation with us, then who is going to save the ISS from an uncontrolled descent from orbit and then falling onto the territory of the United States or Europe?"

NASA issued a statement following the remarks from the head of Russia's space program, saying "The new export control measures will continue to allow U.S.-Russia civil space operations. No changes are planned to the agency's support for ongoing in-orbit and ground-station operations."