Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 133

At the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Kelly Benoit-Bird will discuss how sonar or active acoustics can identify biological hotspots in ocean life, revealing the answer to the food paradox in the sea.

Using active acoustics, researchers could analyze returning echoes from sound pulses to find small activity hotspots throughout the ocean. Conventional sampling often misses these, giving rise to the Lasker food paradox proposed in the 1970s, which found that laboratory animals fed the average concentration of ocean food did not survive, despite their ocean-dwelling counterparts doing fine.

Using radar data from China's Chang'e 3 mission in 2013, researchers are learning more about the stratified layers of the lunar surface.

Volcanic activity on the moon has deposited lava rock on its surface throughout its history. With time, these rocks break down into dust and soil, called regolith, from space weathering and asteroid impacts. Layers of this material have been buried beneath the lunar surface over time as this cycle repeats.

The Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine, along with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is seeking scientific proposals to counteract wear and tear on astronauts during spaceflight.

The NASA-funded Institute's Biomedical Research Advances for Space Health (BRASH) solicitation is investing in science to protect astronauts on future Artemis missions and more. Deep space exploration presents astronauts with many physiological stressors, such as increased radiation exposure and gravity changes, and psychological stressors from isolation, confinement, and the inherent danger in such an environment.

Consequently, astronaut health is impacted as tissues degrade, DNA is damaged, and more. The BRASH solicitation aims to reduce risks to crew member health through supporting the development of disruptive technologies, therapies, or novel approaches to enhancing pre-existing internal cellular repair functions, improving the body's endogenous repair and maintenance systems.

Researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have shown the potential of a new radiation therapy technique to deliver effective, targeted doses to cancer patients.

In a paper published in Scientific Reports, the FLASH radiotherapy (FLASH-RT) method selectively killed cancer cells while minimally damaging nearby healthy cells. FLASH-RT aims to provide rapid, targeted, high-dose radiation therapy as an alternative to weeks of low-dose radiation in other radiotherapy settings. Previously, FLASH-RT has required complex and enormous gymnasium-sized machines that are impractical for clinical use. However, LLNL has found linear induction accelerators (LIAs) to be powerful enough to deliver a sufficient dose while only three meters long, which LLNL previously used in its weapons program.

Long after it was theorized to exist, a new class of stars has been discovered by astronomers.

Using the Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory in California and data from multiple astronomical surveys, researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian made this discovery.

The comet called Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) has just surprised researchers once again as it makes its way through to the edges of our solar system.

BB is a 62-mile wide comet that was first discovered back in 2014 and since then has been a focus point for researchers that want to understand the nature of comets and retrace their life-spans. Researchers analyzed data from the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that was acquired between 2018 and 2020, what they found was that BB was "active" much earlier than anticipated.

A comet becomes "active" when light from the Sun heats up the comets surface, melting the icy crust and turning it into water vapor, causing the iconic "tail", or "coma" that defines a comet. The researchers found that BB was active when it was much farther away from the Sun than previously anticipated, which has now pushed the possible distance for active comets out much further than researchers have previously estimated.

Russia recently tested an anti-satellite weapon out on one of its decommissioned satellites, sparking global debate over the new space debris caused by the test.

The anti-satellite weapon test caused new 1,500 pieces of space debris to join the already thousands of pieces floating around low-Earth orbit. Some of these space debris are travelling at extremely high speeds and can be a hazard to satellites, the International Space Station (ISS), and astronauts. Shortly after the weapon test was conducted, astronauts aboard the ISS were told to take cover in escape vehicles by NASAas space debris from the satellite break up were in-bound.

Russia's Minister-general of the army, Sergei Shoigu, commented on the space debris having the potential to pose a threat to future space activities, saying "the resulting fragments do not pose any threat to space activities". Now, the Pentagon has called for all global halt to testing anti-satellite weaponry, which was further backed up with condemnation for Russia's recent actions.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) has tracked another fireball event across the United States, as more than 50 people have reported a sighting.

The new listing appears on the American Meteor Society website and states the AMS received 52 reports about a fireball appearing in the night sky over several US states. Reports came from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Ohio, and Indianapolis. The AMS says that the sighting occurred on Wednesday, December 1st, 2021, around 03:14 UT.

Reports indicate that the fireball was visible for around 2.5 seconds before it disintegrated in Earth's atmosphere, seemingly disappearing in front of onlookers. For those that don't know, the AMS categorizes a meteor as a "fireball" if it is brighter than the planet Venus. There is two videos of the entry of the fireball, one above and one below. If you are interested in reading more about meteors, check out this link here.

Astronomers were trying to measure the dark matter profile for one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and discovered a massive black hole at the galaxy's center.

Astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory were inspecting a Milky Way dwarf galaxy called Leo I in an attempt to find out of dark matter density increases or decreases towards a galaxy's center. Leo I lacks dark matter, hence its selection as an inspection candidate. The astronomers compiled the data and implemented it, along with models, into a supercomputer and were shocked at the results.

A NASA expert has answered the following question in a new video posted to the NASA YouTube channel, "What's it Like Landing on Mars?"

Answering this week's question is NASA thermal engineer Alex Scammell, who explains that landing on Mars is a complicated process that is quite challenging, but after every attempt, the agency gains more knowledge on how to execute the landing process more effectively and efficiently. The latest rover to land on the surface of Mars is NASA's Perseverance rover that went from traveling 13,000 mph to a soft landing in just seven minutes. This process included using parachutes, thrusters, and a sky crane.

Scammell goes on to explain that majority of the decrease in speed can be attributed to the Martian atmosphere creating drag on the rover's heat shield. The NASA thermal engineer explains that understanding what the heat shield experienced while it was plummeting towards the surface of the Red Planet would allow for NASA engineers to improve upon future design iterations, which is why NASA engineers equipped instruments under Perseverance's heat shield that measure its conditions.

NASA 360 posted a video to its YouTube that's a part of its Planetary Defense series that is detailing asteroids that are close to Earth.

The video was posted to the channel back in October and was recently shared to the NASA 360 Twitter account, where NASA posed itself the question, "What do we know about the asteroids and comets in Earth's neighborhood?". The video showcases what NASA knows about near-Earth asteroids by the numbers, and explains that while the majority of the potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroids have been found, there are still some thousands of undiscovered asteroids still out there in our neighborhood.

For those that don't know, Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets that are orbiting the Sun and come within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit. The space agency explains in the description of the video that NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office was conceived to track, study NEOs, and if the situation presented itself, provide guidance into deflecting a potential threat to Earth. Below are the numbers outlined by NASA in the video.

Recently, the longest plant experiment in the history of the International Space Station (ISS) came to an end, breaking records for plants grown on the floating laboratory.

A new blog post on the NASA website details the achievements made and states that on November 26 Expedition 66 Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei harvested some 26 chilie peppers that were grown from four plants grown aboard the ISS's Advanced Plant Habitat (APH) for 137 days. Hei, along with other crew members, sampled the harvested peppers, which broke the record for feeding the most astronauts from a crop grown in space.

Ana Racoveanu is a scientist synthesizing energetic compounds with isotopic labels, a rare feat in the nuclear security enterprise.

Isotopic labeling uses various stable isotopes of given elements in the place of their most common isotope throughout a chemical reaction. The different properties of the non-standard isotope allow its progress through the reaction to be tracked, providing insight into the mechanics of the reaction itself. The goal of creating isotopically labeled energetic materials is to help make munitions safer to handle and use.

These days, transistors in classical computers are measured on the nanometer scale, but superconducting qubits used in quantum are still measured in millimeters.

Qubits exist in an infinite gradation of binary states, and for quantum computers to excel, their qubits need to be on the same wavelength. Traditionally, this has been a size-constrained issue, leading to massive processors and quantum computers. Much like shrinking transistors in classical computers, a way to shrink qubits will be necessary to make quantum computing more viable in the future.

Wang Fong-Jen Professor James Hone's lab at Columbia Engineering has recently collaborated with Raytheon BBN Technologies to shrink qubits by shrinking the capacitors used to power them. Planar capacitors have been used previously, but stacking them to save space would result in interference from the metals used with the qubits.

Scientists speculate that underground fungal networks are a critical but largely overlooked component of global climate change and are looking to change that.

Researchers aim to collect ten thousand DNA samples from fungi by working with local communities worldwide, hoping to determine how their networks are being affected by human activity like global warming. With this, the researchers want to construct a global map of the networks.

On November 30th, during the 181st Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Angeles Salles of Johns Hopkins University will discuss how bats use echolocation to find prey and track and predict its trajectory.

Bats use echolocation to create echo snapshots of their environment, capturing it in discrete stages. They generate the sounds used for echolocation from their larynx or by clicking their tongues and process the echoes that return after sending out those noises. These noises are typically ultrasonic, so humans are unable to hear them.

Unlike predators that rely on visual cues, this allows bats to hunt in total darkness. Because they cannot track prey continuously as a predator would visually, the echo snapshots provide staggered sensory information on the prey as it moves through space. The bat's brain creates a predictive model that allows it to extrapolate the prey's trajectory based on its movement through the snapshots it receives.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is set to revolutionize in-space astronomy, picking up where Hubble will leave off with a host of new technologies.

One of the instruments about the JWST is the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), which requires special cooling down to 6 Kelvin, something that engineers cannot fully test here on Earth. Hubble observes the universe in the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, up to about 1.8-micrometer wavelengths. MIRI, as the name implies, sees into the mid-infrared part of the spectrum and beyond. MIRI will be able to see between 5 and 28-micron wavelength light.

Following an internal SpaceX email obtained by Space Explored that revealed SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying SpaceX could face bankruptcy in the future, a leaked video of the interior of Starship has surfaced.

The leaked email purportedly from Elon Musk states that Starship, the biggest rocket ever, is needed to get V2 Starlink internet satellites into orbit, and to get Starship operational, the production of Raptor engines needs to increase drastically. Musk describes the Raptor engine production situation as a "crisis", and writes, "What it comes down to, is that we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can't achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year."

Now, a leaked video also obtained by Space Explored showcases a rare look inside of the Starship launch vehicle. According to the publication, the video showcases a SpaceX employee recording the interior of the nosecone and that the interior is recognizable from exploded Starship prototypes. It should be noted that at the time of writing this SpaceX, nor Elon Musk has denied or confirmed the leaked stories are legitimate. If you are interested in reading more on this story, check out this link here.

According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the production of SpaceX's Raptor engines that will be equipped to its upcoming launch vehicle called Starship may cause SpaceX to face bankruptcy.

In an email obtained by Space Explored that was sent out to SpaceX staff over the Thanksgiving weekend by Musk, the CEO explains that the lack of Raptor engine product has caused a situation that has turned into something much worse than it was a few weeks ago. Musk describes the situation as a "crisis", and says he will be working on the Raptor production over the Thanksgiving weekend and requests any SpaceX staff that have free time to assist him.

"Unless you have critical family matters or cannot physically return to Hawthorne, we will need all hands-on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster", reads the email. The email continues and mentions that the Raptor engines required to launch Starship is needed to launch V2 Starlink internet satellites as V2 Starlink satellites cannot be attached to SpaceX's current launch vehicle workhorse the Falcon 9. Starlink is needed to get V2 Starlinks into orbit, which SpaceX is relying on as cash inflow.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has chimed in on the recent controversy surrounding space debris caused by a Russian anti-satellite missile test.

On November 15, Russia tested an anti-satellite missile on one of its own satellites, which caused thousands of new space debris to emerge in Earth's orbit. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) can be heard being told by NASA Headquarters to prepare to launch back down to Earth and take shelter in spaceships such as SpaceX's Crew Dragon. NASA condemned the actions by Russia, to which the country responded by defending its actions with the minister-general Sergei Shoigu saying that the debris "don't pose any threat to space activities."

Currently, 1,500 pieces of space debris are being tracked. However, they all haven't been found and may take some time to be found. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks satellites and debris objects, spoke to Insider and said, "If [a satellite] gets hit by one of the bigger pieces of debris... it could completely destroy the satellite into thousands of more pieces. You could see debris hitting the satellites, causing more debris that then hits more satellites."