Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 128

With its seventeenth flight on December 5th, Ingenuity surpassed thirty minutes of flight time above the Martian surface.

The 117-second flight time brings the Martian helicopter to a total of 30 minutes and 48 seconds. Originally designed as a technology demonstration, with five experimental test flights planned, Ingenuity has exceeded expectations. So far, it has traveled a total of 3592 meters (2.2 miles), reached an altitude of 12 meters (40 feet), and a top speed of 5 meters per second (10 miles per hour).

Ingenuity's status was temporarily unknown following its December 5th flight, as its in-flight data stream was unexpectedly cut out. The Mars Perseverance rover did receive data packets from Ingenuity which suggested it was still active. On December 10th, data was downlinked to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that showed the flight was a success and Ingenuity is still in excellent condition.

A common gene mutation responsible for hearing loss has been targeted with a new therapy, reversing hearing loss found in mice.

At least 100 different genes have links to hearing loss, but one gene is responsible for up to sixteen percent of genetic hearing loss, STRC. The Boston Children's Hospital developed the new gene therapy technique replacing stereocilin, a mutated protein in the inner ear, to return hearing closer or back to normal levels.

The team now plans to test the technique with the human STRC gene, using cell cultures of human inner ear cells cultivated from patients with STRC hearing loss. To enable hearing, sensory hair cells within the inner ear must contact the tectorial membrane of the ear. The stereocilin protein provides structure to that hair cells to facilitate this contact.

Researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have published two papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics showing observations of a newly observed star near the center of our galaxy.

Many stars were captured in images of the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, using the ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). VLTI has enabled image capture at a zoom level twenty times greater than what was possible before. Within the images, astronomers identified a new never-before-seen star, dubbed S300.

Arriving recently at the International Space Station (ISS) for an eleven day stay, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa also brought some Uber Eats to share.

Launching on December 8th, Maezawa brought ready-to-eat canned Japanese dishes to share with the Expedition 66 crew. The meals included boiled mackerel in miso, beef bowl cooked in sweet sauce, simmered chicken with bamboo shoots, and braised pork, a welcome reprieve from the everyday meals aboard the ISS.

Researchers from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have identified a host of new plastic-degrading enzymes associated with an uptick in plastic pollution.

The researchers analyzed DNA samples from hundreds of locations globally and found a correlation between local levels of plastic pollution and the number of microbial enzymes capable of breaking down said plastic. Computer analysis identified plastic-degrading potential in the DNA, and the results were cross-referenced with official numbers for plastic waste pollution at the locations where the DNA was sampled.

A new technique to help astronomers find and identify 'bright' black holes has been developed by researchers from the University of Western Australia (UWA) node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a compact region of space at a galaxy's center, with higher than average luminosity. The light emissions come from portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that show stars do not produce them and instead indicate an active black hole.

New reports indicate that a powerful storm is moving through several states across the US, bringing dangerous winds and the potential for blizzard conditions.

According to a report from AccuWeather, a "potent" storm is currently ripping through central states in the US with high wind speeds. The storm is expected to swing northeast, where it will bring some snow to the northern Plains throughout the middle of the week. AccuWeather warns that the storm will bring high wind speed to affected areas, which can raise the chances of a fast-moving wildfire in the area.

Researchers from Stanford University have published a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, showing how forecasts may become unreliable sooner due to increasingly warmer weather.

An increase of only a few degrees Celsius is enough to reduce the reliability of temperature, wind, and rainfall forecasts by a day. Each degree reduces the accuracy of forecasts by several hours, with a day of accuracy being lost for precipitation with every three-degree rise and a day lost for wind and temperature forecasts for a five-degree rise.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce that it has successfully received a sample that originally came from outer space.

The space agency has posted to its social channels that it has received a Hayabusa2 sample canister that contains fragments of the asteroid Ryugu, which the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) retrieved in June 2018 when the Japanese spacecraft landed on the asteroid. The Hayabusa2 aircraft departed from the Ryugu asteroid in November 2019, and the samples it was carrying returned back to Earth on December 5, 2020.

Now, JAXA is sharing the samples with NASA by transferring them to researchers at ARES, the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division located at the Johnson Space Center. NASA writes that its researchers have now received 23 millimeter-sized grains and four containers of even finer material from the surface of the asteroid Ryugu, which equates to about 10% of the total samples collected. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

A team of astronomers detected a mysterious signal that appears to be the birth of a baby black hole or possibly a neutron star.

A new study published in Nature Astronomy details a mysterious signal that was detected in 2018 that came from 200 million light-years away. Researchers dubbed this signal "the Cow", and now MIT researchers detail in the recently released study that the signal contains millions of high-energy X-ray pulses. These X-ray pulses were found to flash at regular intervals of every 4.4 milliseconds.

After further analysis there researchers estimated that the object emitting these signals could be no larger than 621 miles wide and has a mass 800 times less than the mass of the Sun. Futurism reports that these dimensions are too small for a large black hole, leading researchers to consider it may be a baby black hole. Additionally, the astronomers say that the celestial object could be a supernova that turned into a neutron star.

In the coming weeks, NASA will be launching its next-generation space telescope that has scientists and researchers sweating.

NASA is nearing the end of the road for its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as the agency is only days away from its scheduled launch on December 22. The JWST cost approximately $10 billion, has been in development for more than 20 years and is the most complicated and powerful space telescope ever created. The telescope is described as a piece of origami as it folds up into the Ariane 5 rocket, and once out in space, unfolds itself over a six-month period.

While the construction of the telescope was certainly a monumental challenge for engineers, the most terrifying part is almost here. The JWST will be loaded into the Ariane 5 rocket, where it will need to survive the vibrations of the launch. After reaching its designated location a million miles away from Earth, the JWST will slowly unfold, keeping the world on edge for 29 harrowing days as thousands of parts of the telescope work in unison.

NASA has announced that its Parker Solar probe has officially arrived at the Sun and "touched" it, marking a big moment in solar science.

NASA has released a video on its NASA Goddard YouTube channel that explains the Parker Solar probe mission and what researchers were planning on achieving when it was launched in August 2018. The probe was launched with the goal of getting closer to the Sun than ever before, and now after years of traveling towards our star, the probe has officially entered the Sun's atmosphere.

The Parker probe has passed the boundary that marks the edge of the Sun's atmosphere called the Alfven critical surface. The exact location of this boundary was unknown until the Parker solar probe recently passed through it, allowing NASA to estimate based on remote images of the Sun's corona, the boundary is anywhere between 4.3 to 8.6 million miles from the surface of the Sun. NASA's solar probe is flying through the Sun's upper atmosphere and is taking samples of particles and the magnetic fields of the unknown region.

An astrophotographer has snapped an incredible new image of the Sun, showcasing the violent and chaotic surface of our star.

The astrophotographer that snapped the image is Andrew McCarthy that states he used a modified telescope to take more than 150,000 separate images of the star. With those 150,000 images, McCarthy combined them all together, stacking all of the data that he acquired in a process that he says took about 10 hours. Additionally, it took another 3-4 hours to take the raw image to its final form. McCarthy posted the image on Twitter, saying, "Yesterday I took a 300 megapixel photo of our star".

According to a report from ScienceAlert, McCarthy snapped the images of the Sun from his backyard in Arizona on November 29, 2021. The astrophotographer writes on his website that the image is called "Fire and Fusion", and it showcases the violent and chaotic nature of the Sun as "planet-sized streams that snake up from the surface, dwarfed by looming prominences and filaments."

In a paper published in PNAS, physicists from Leiden University in the Netherlands have used a piece of corrugated rubber as a computer.

The rubber is placed in a press and then slowly crushed by it. Initially, the corrugations slowly deform before suddenly snapping into another shape. Researchers Martin van Hecke and Hadrien Bense used these snaps as bits, where the rubber buckling denotes a shift from 0 to 1 and unbuckling represents a shift back to 0.

The pair charted all states using cameras, identifying three bits. Consequently, eight possible states are theoretically possible. The system is shown to have a crude form of memory and can count to two. A video was posted to the Leiden Institute of Physics' YouTube channel showing the system's progression.

In a new study led by the University of Washington, researchers have demonstrated artificial intelligence's ability to improve lightning forecasts.

Lightning strikes led to the devastating California Lightning Complex fires of 2020, but the strikes are still relatively hard to predict. With more accurate forecasts, firefighters could potentially mitigate wildfires by getting the chance to stop smaller fires caused by strikes before they grow out of control, as well as helping to forecast severe weather systems like thunderstorms.

The American Geophysical Union's (AGU) 2021 Fall Meeting will host talks discussing the new missions, including the TROPICS, EMIT, NOAA's JPSS-2, and SWOT missions, launching in 2022.

The TROPICS mission will monitor tropical cyclones using six small satellites. As frequently as every fifty minutes, the satellites will make microwave observations of a storm's precipitation, temperature, and humidity to understand the mechanics driving the storm's intensity and make forecasts more accurate.

The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) will be installed aboard the International Space Station (ISS). It will use an imaging spectrometer to trace the origin and composition of mineral dust that makes its way into the atmosphere. This dust can affect the climate through radiative forcing (changing the amount of solar energy entering and leaving the atmosphere) and impact various ecosystems and air quality.

Since 1915 when Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity, scientists have worked on testing its limits, and with the results of this 16-year test, it still holds up.

Professor Michael Kramer from the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, led an international team to complete this test, which included using Murriyang, Australia's radio telescope at CSIRO's Parkes Observatory. The theory of general relativity describes how gravity works at large scales across the universe, but it becomes unreliable at the atomic scale, where quantum mechanics are referred to instead.

A team from the University of Central Florida (UCF) has developed the world's first optical oscilloscope, capable of measuring the electric field of light.

An oscilloscope is an instrument that graphically displays electrical signals and shows how they change over time regarding voltage, amplitude, frequency, and other factors. This new device converts light oscillations into electrical signals, then displayed on the oscilloscope.

Light oscillates significantly faster than electric fields in current technology, which oscillates at gigahertz frequencies corresponding to the radio and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The increased frequency of light waves allows them to transmit a significantly higher density of information but has also been the source of the difficulty in reading its electric field.

The 2022 World Inequality Report states that one space flight emits more carbon dioxide than the lifetimes of one billion people.

The newly released report outlines the carbon costs of launching a rocket to space and compares that amount of carbon per tonne to the amount of carbon created by one billion of the world's poorest individuals over their lifetimes. The passage also mentions that the carbon footprint of the spaceflight that is being compared to the carbon footprint of the individuals is over an 11-minute space ride.

According to the report, around one billion individuals emit less than one tonne of carbon per person per year. Over a lifetime, this group of one billion individuals "does not emit more than 75 tonnes of carbon per person". This report, and specifically the comparison between the carbon footprint of a single 11-minute spaceflight and the carbon footprint of one billion of the world's poorest individuals, puts a spotlight on the unequal distribution between the carbon footprint of wealthy individuals compared to poor individuals.

Comet Leonard will be passing safely by Earth at a distance of 21 million miles, and it's currently at its closest point to Earth before it makes its way closer to the Sun.

Astrophotographer Chris Schur.

What is expected to be the brightest comet of 2021, Come Leonard, or Comet C/2021, is currently at its closest point to Earth at a safe distance of 21 million miles. The comet was first discovered by Gregory J. Leonard in January 2021, and after observing the comet more, the researchers discovered it has an extremely elliptical orbit around the Sun that takes around 80,000 years to complete. After Leonard passes Earth, it will be ejected out of the solar system for millions of years.