Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 128

NASA is gearing up for the launch of a new telescope that will be able to see further back in time than any other telescope before it.

James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA is currently running the final tests for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that is scheduled to launch no earlier than December 24. The new telescope, poised to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is the most complicated and advanced observatory ever built - truly a feat of engineering. The telescope will be capable of looking further back in time than any other telescope before it, giving researchers the opportunity to learn about the universe in its earliest stages.

NASA announced that it had to delay the launch of its next-generation space telescope that was scheduled for liftoff next week.

According to the announcement from the space agency, the James Webb Space Telescope was scheduled for launch on December 22 to no earlier than December 24. NASA wrote on its blog and social channels on December 14 that the James Webb Space Telescope team was currently working on a communication issue, which was only recently fixed according to NASA's associate administrator for science missions, Thomas Zurbuchen.

Many scientists worldwide and individuals who have worked on the James Webb Space Telescope are nervous about the upcoming launch. The telescope has faced countless delays throughout its long development and, as a result, has been quite exponentially expensive.

NASA recently announced that the Mars rover Perseverance has acquired a sample that has implications for understanding the entire planet.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce that on November 12, the Perseverance rover that's stationed in the Jezero Crater took a sample from a South Seitah rock that showed evidence of "Brac", or as NASA explains, "an unusual abundance of large olivine crystals engulfed in pyroxene crystals."

After further inspection, the findings were presented at a news briefing at the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, where researchers stated that the bedrock the rover has been driving on since landing in the Jezero Crater likely formed from red-hot magma that interacted with water at some stage in the cooling process. Additionally, it was announced that the water that interacted with the rocks contain organic molecules.

Boeing announced on December 13th that it will be launching its Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) in May 2022, after initial setbacks.

Following the previous attempt to make Starliner flight-ready, Boeing and NASA have spent the last four months troubleshooting the cause of several stuck valves on the propulsion system that scrubbed the mission. OFT-2, the Starliner's second orbital test flight, is scheduled for sometime in May 2022, where Boeing will launch the craft to the ISS aboard an Atlas V rocket.

The first orbital flight test took place in December 2019 but failed to arrive at the ISS due to several software anomalies. The second orbital test flight was initially scheduled for August 2021, corrosion sealed off five of the thirteen propulsion system valves. The other nine were unstuck, but engineers ultimately had to reschedule the test.

Apollo 17, NASA's final Moon landing mission of the Apollo program taking place in 1972, brought back samples from the lunar surface, which are still being studied today.

A new study has been conducted on a moon rock collected during Apollo 17, designated "troctolite 76535." The study was led by William Nelson, an Earth Sciences graduate from the University of Hawai'i (UH) at Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), using a specialized electron microprobe to perform the analysis of troctolite 76535.

Nelson and his team simulated the cooling paths using the UH High-Performance Computing facilities. They observed the diffusion patterns of the chemicals found within the rock likely cooled faster than previous estimates. Previous estimations suggested a 100-million-year cooling period for the lunar crust, but the findings of the microprobe indicate this period of lunar magma cooling took no more than 20 million years.

The new approach allows researchers to computationally test billions of potential drug candidates' compatibility with target receptors.

Receptors cover the surface of every cell, which allows cells in our body to bind with an enormous variety of compounds, including pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs. Thirty percent of pharmaceutical drugs are designed to target G protein-coupled receptors, but these drugs often bind to other unintended receptors throughout the body, generating undesired side effects.

A drug needs to be designed to induce the intended chemical reaction in a cell while simultaneously not triggering unintended effects and not binding to other non-target receptors. All of these constraints make drug design rather tricky.

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.

Genzel's team, known as the GRAVITY collaboration, developed an instrument dubbed 'GRAVITY,' which uses interferometry to combine the light of all four 8.2-meter telescopes from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). The result is images twenty times sharper than those taken by individual VLT telescopes alone. The team could then use these observations to track stars orbiting Sagittarius A* to ascertain the properties of the black hole and test the theory of general relativity. Published to ESO's YouTube channel, you can view an animation of these orbits.

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.

Between December 13th and 19th, Uber is offering the first 24,800 people to use promo code SPACEFOOD $10 off for orders valued at $20 or more. The number of people is derived from the 248 miles the trip took. The delivery took 8 hours and 34 minutes, a length of time the Soyuz Maezawa launched aboard cannot keep heated food viable for, hence the choice of cuisine.

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.

Over 30,000 homologous enzymes were identified, with the potential to degrade ten different types of common plastics. With eight million tons of plastic entering the ocean annually and some varieties taking hundreds of years to degrade naturally, these enzymes could provide a promising way to deal with the pollution.

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.

Using an algorithm called ProSpect, the researchers could model the emissions of different wavelengths of light from galaxies and black holes. Measuring both gives researchers an idea of how the black hole impacts its host galaxy. Applying the method to almost five hundred thousand galaxies from the Anglo-Australian Telescope's DEVILS survey and more than two hundred thousand galaxies from the GAMA survey, over 75,000 AGN's were identified.

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.

According to AccuWeather, the powerful winds as expected to hit Rapid City, Denver,m Omaha, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Flagstaff. Warnings have been dropped for widespread wind damage, dangerous crosswinds, and power outages. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

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.

Global average temperatures have risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century, however, temperature increase varies depending on the area. Some cities in the United States have risen by more than 2 degrees Celsius since 1970.

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.