Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 159

If you are interested in space, you are most likely interested in the International Space Station (ISS). So, how about you go on a tour?

European Space Agency (ESA) ISS astronaut Thomas Pesquet has decided to be your guide as the ESA has posted a video to its YouTube channel that details a new series that will take viewers on a tour through the floating laboratory with 360-degree cameras. The new series is appropriately named Space Station 360 and will allow the viewer to control the camera to look around in their desired location.

As for the video above, Pesquet details the Node 2 module, giving explanations for all of the features contained within it. Node 2 is described as a "connecting module" or "communication module", and is the "crossroads" of the ISS. The module is where cargo vehicles dock, tools are stored, sleeping stations, and more. If you are interested in more of this unique ISS tour, check out this link here.

The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is moving closer and closer to its launch. Introducing the James Webb Space Telescope, the world's most powerful space telescope.

Anyone who is interested in space and all of the subcategories that can be derived from the topic is excited about the launch of the James Webb Telescope, as the power the telescope brings to the table will allow for researchers to observe the universe like they never have before. NASA is currently preparing for the launch of the telescope.

Gregory Robinson, Webb's program director at NASA headquarters in Washington, said, "NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has reached a major turning point on its path toward launch with the completion of final observatory integration and testing. We have a tremendously dedicated workforce who brought us to the finish line, and we are very excited to see that Webb is ready for launch and will soon be on that science journey."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has fired off a shot at Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos after Amazon sent a letter to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Amazon sent a letter to the FCC asking the regulatory agency not to allow SpaceX to launch a new set of its Starlink satellites, and in response to the letter SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken to his Twitter account to poke some fun at former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Musk said that it "Turns out Besos retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX ..."

This isn't the first time a company run by Bezos has pushed for regulation of SpaceXs' plans as Blue Origin earlier this month has moved to sue NASA over its decision to award SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to construct the next lunar lander. The decision to sue NASA and the previous arguments put forward by Blue Origin has resulted in numerous delays with the construction of the new lunar lander, which has now raised concern about the likelihood of NASA being able to put humans back on the moon in 2024.

NASA is sending launching another resupply trip to the International Space Station with SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft.

The Dragon spacecraft launched aboard the Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida with more than 4,800 pounds of cutting-edge science for researchers aboard the laboratory to enjoy. The cargo delivery is scheduled to arrive on Monday. It includes ants, avocados, a human-sized robotic arm, and numerous testing equipment designed to monitor astronaut health progression.

Other items aboard the cargo shipment are fresh foods such as lemons, ice cream for the floating laboratories, seven astronauts, shrimp, plant test subjects, seeds, weeds, concrete samples, solar cells, and more. All of the items aboard the cargo ship will be exposed to weightlessness and studied by the astronaut researchers in their respective fields. Assisting the astronauts in their study will be Gitai Inc.'s robotic arm that is designed to take on mundane tasks from astronauts, freeing up their time to accomplish something more of value.

The International Space Station (ISS) will soon be getting a bunch of new cutting-edge science toys to play around with in microgravity.

SpaceX will be transporting the cargo aboard the company's Dragon resupply spacecraft that launched at 3:14 a.m. EDT Sunday on a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The cargo's weight comes in at a total of 4,800 pounds and includes new experiments, supplies for the astronauts aboard the floating laboratory, and hardware.

The Dragon spacecraft will automatically dock with the ISS on Monday, August 30 and will stay at the ISS for around a month while astronauts aboard the lab remove the cargo and prepare for Dragon's separation. Below is what science is included in the cargo.

During an expedition in July, researchers came across what is now believed to be the "northernmost" landmass in the world.

Currently, the official northernmost landmass is Oodaaq, which is a bank of gravel and silt northeast of Greenland. However, Morten Rasch from Copenhagen University's department of geosciences and natural resource management, and head on the expedition, "We were informed that there had been an error on my GPS which had led us to believe that we were standing on Oodaaq Island. In reality, we had discovered a new island further north, a discovery that just slightly expands the kingdom."

For context of where this "new" island is, Oodaaq is around 700 miles south from the North Pole, and this recently discovered island is about 2,000 feet north of Oodaaq. While Greenland is undoubtedly pleased to discover more of its kingdom, researchers are concerned that the ocean could swallow the recently discovered landmass as it only resides 96 to 196 feet above sea level. Rasch added, "No one knows how long it will remain. In principle, it could disappear as soon as a powerful new storm hits."

A new study published in the journal Geology has detailed the discovery of a fossilized brain that dates back 310 million years.

According to the study, researchers uncovered what is being described as a "one in a million" fossilized brain of a horseshoe crab, specifically from the crab species called Euproops danae. The researchers found the crab brain in Mazon Creek, Illinois, where conditions consist of iron carbonate minerals named siderite, which the corpse of the crab was wrapped in - fossilizing it for all of that time.

Russell Bicknell, the led author on the study, and paleontologist at the University of New England in Maine, spoke to Live Science and said, "This is the first and only evidence of a brain in a fossilized horseshoe crab." Bicknell clarified that over the millions of years, the brain tissue of the crab decomposed, but due to the fossilization, the mineral kaolinite created a perfect mold of the brain. "We have a mold of the brain, not the brain itself. If we start looking, we may be lucky enough to find more brain fossils", said Bicknell.

During NASA's Mars helicopter 12th and most recent flight, the small scout named Ingenuity snapped its most valuable images.

The area is dubbed South Seitah, and during Ingenuity's flight that occurred on August 16, the helicopter scoped out the area by taking some incredible pictures of landscapes. According to Ken Farley, the project scientist for NASA's Perseverance rover, Ingenuity's recent images are the most valuable images the helicopter has ever taken because they are giving project planners essential data that impacts the route of the Perseverance rover.

NASA's goal is to find prime locations that Perseverance can traverse and inspect. Through the rover's inspection, NASA hopes to gain a deeper understanding of possible ancient microbial life and also the history of Mars' geology. There are certain locations where this data is best extrapolated from the planet and these locations where there are sedimentary rock - rock that shows erosion, weathering, dissolution, precipitation, and lithification.

Space telescopes receiving light that was from billions of years ago is quite literally allowing researchers to peer back in time.

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope is one of the space agency's telescopes that do such a thing, and according to the led author of the study, Patrick Armstrong, a Ph.D. student at the Australian National University, "The light we were seeing had actually left that star a billion years ago".

Armstrong added that it was lucky that the space telescope was observing the area of space where the explosion occurred as a star, while it can live for billions of years, it explodes in just a matter of weeks, leaving a relatively small window of opportunity for observations to be made of a supernova. Kepler is providing researchers with an abundance of data to go over, which means that discoveries from observations made by Kepler usually happen years after the images were taken.

One way researchers discover "new" craters on Mars is to analyze images taken from NASA satellites that are pointed at the surface of the Red Planet.

Researchers will look at a collection of images spanning over various time frames, then compare images of the surface to each other. If a new crater appears between an image taken on A date and an image taken B date, then researchers can estimate that an impact must have occurred sometime between the dates of the images taken. To analyze one image, a researcher will spend about 40 minutes.

As humans tend to do, we have offloaded the process to technology that can complete the task much more efficiently, freeing up time for researchers to work on other tasks. Researchers have now used a supercomputer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to train an artificial intelligence with around 7,000 images, reducing the time it takes to analyze a single image to just 5 seconds and causing the discovery of new craters.

As humans continue to expand our understanding of what technology is capable of, we also expand our understanding of the world we live in.

The evolution of human knowledge through the advancement of the technologies we create comes in various forms, and one of those forms is radar technology. In 2013 it was discovered that beneath the Greenland ice sheet, there is the world's longest canyon that is 460 miles in length, putting it above China's 308-mile-long (496 km) Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, which is renowned as the world's longest visible canyon.

Not only has the world's longest canyon been discovered through the use of emerging new technologies, but so have vast mountain ranges beneath the 2 mile-thick ice sheet. The data recovered by these technologies revealed a topographic map of the world beneath the glaciers, making researchers interesting in certain aspects of the glaciers; water beneath the surface containing clues about past events, meteor impacts, lakes of various sizes, and perfectly preserved fossil plants.

If you haven't heard about the Carrington event then I suggest you read up on it, but back in 1859 there was a gigantic solar flare that -- if it happened now -- would knock us back into the Stone Age.

But in a new study, Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi of the University of California, Irvine warned that a solar storm could knock the internet down for weeks if not more. In the presentation titled "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse" found that local and regional Internet infrastructure could be hit but they would be fine -- the long undersea cables on the other hand, are at risk.

Why? The local and regional internet infrastructure isn't at a high risk because the optical fiber isn't affected by geomagnetically induced currents -- meanwhile, short cable spans are grounded regularly. But, undersea cables on the other hand... would be knocked out of operation. The reason is that there are repeaters under the sea that connect the internet cables, at around 50-150km apart.

You might be chowing down on a 3D-printed Wagyu steak in the very near future, with Japanese scientists creating Wagyu steak with marbling "just like the real thing".

A team out of the Osaka University replicated some of the best-tasting beef on the planet -- Wagyu -- which even has fat, muscle, and blood vessels in an intricate structure producing a marble effect. Wagyu beef is known worldwide as one of the most famous (and delicious) for its high content of "intramuscular fat" and marbling, recreated with 3D printing.

The marbling side of things is what gives Wagyu beef its delicious, deep flavors and specific texture -- so 3D printing Wagyu beef is a true feat. The researchers used two types of stem stells: bovine satellite cells and adipose-derived stem cells, insulated from Wagyu cows. They then incubated and coaxed the cells into becoming the various cell types required for the individual fibers for muscle, fat, and blood vessels -- they were piled on top of each other into a 3D stack that re-creates the marbling of the delicious Wagyu beef.

And so it begins... Taiwan has just boosted its defense budget by 10% in 2021, with the Taiwanese government to spend a large chunk of that on new war-ready aircraft.

Taiwan has boosted its defense budget to $16.89 billion with $1.4 billion of that going into new warplanes, which should turn out to be US-made F16 fighter jets. Once it's all said and done, Taiwan should have 200 of the high-end war-ready aircraft -- more than any other country in Asia.

Why? Well, China really wants to take Taiwan over -- Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan, and the CCP military has reportedly said it would also drop nuclear bombs on Taiwan continuously if it stepped in between the fight between China and Taiwan... so Taiwan needs to be ready, and so too do its allies around the world -- including the USA.

NASA's newest Mars rover has captured on video a shiny object in the martian sky, according to a new post on Twitter.

The news comes from NASA's Perseverance Mars rover Twitter account, which posted a short video of the Perseverance rover aiming its cameras towards Mars' bleak sky. The shiny object seen in the video is one of Mars' moons, Deimos. Mars has two moons Deimos and Phobos, and according to current research, Deimos measures in at a diameter of 7.7 miles.

Deimos is located 14,576 miles from Mars and is the further moon of two that orbit Mars. As for its orbit, Deimos orbits Mars once every 30.3 hours and is also not spherically shaped like the moon that orbits Earth. If you are interested in reading any more news about space, check out this article about a study that suggests aliens could be thriving on these "super-Earth's".

NASA is planning on making the long venture back to the moon, but why is the space agency selecting the more for exploration?

In a new video posted to the NASA YouTube channel, the space agency details all of its reasons why it wants to go back to the moon. NASA researchers explain that the moon holds opportunities for humans to discover more about Earth, our Sun, and our entire solar system.

NASA says that its Artemis program that is set to put humans back on the moon by 2024 will pave the way forward for future generations to be inspired by its accomplishments. In more detail, NASA explains that the agency needs to learn how to establish a community on another cosmic shore because "Mars is calling". When a community is created long-term science will be underway to better understand our neighbors and the planet we call home.

Most people that are aware of asteroids understand that if a large one was to ever line up with Earth, it could be a catastrophe.

NASA has published a new video to its YouTube channel as a part of its "We Asked a NASA scientists" series where a NASA scientist was asked if an asteroid will ever hit Earth. A NASA asteroid expert, Dr. Kelly Fast, explained that many asteroids have hit Earth over the course of its history and that asteroids will continue to do so potentially millions of years into the future.

Fast explains that dust, meteorites, and asteroids hit Earth all the time and cause what we commonly refer to as "shooting stars" in the night sky. These shooting stars are dust, meteorites, and asteroids burning up in Earth's atmosphere as the planet's gravity pulls them in. As for large asteroids that pose a threat to the surface of the planet, NASA says there are currently no known impact threats.

NASA has its eyes set on a specific type of planet for its next search for extraterrestrial life out the deep dark cosmos.

In a new video posted on the Bloomberg Quicktake YouTube channel, NASA scientists outline the reasons why the space agency is looking towards planets or moons that contain liquid water for signs of extraterrestrial life. NASA experts believe that if there is life outside of Earth, these moons or planets that are hosting liquid water beneath their icy crust are the best chance of finding it. Why do NASA believe this?

Researchers on Earth have found life in the strangest of places, and one of these places was the bottom of the ocean near hydrothermal vents. Life was found near these vents, and not just simple life forms either - a high diversity of life was found. This discovery changed human understanding of where life can exist, thus suggesting that other objects in our solar system that have extreme conditions similar to Earth's extreme conditions may also be able to support life.

The internet rarely takes matters seriously, and whenever there is an opportunity to poke fun at a subject, it seems that opportunity is taken.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin New Shepard rocket is seemingly facing the firing squad of the internet as individuals are making jokes about the miniature New Shepard rocket that is available for purchase. On July 20, Jeff Bezos briefly went to space aboard the New Shepard rocket. Now, Estes Industries partnered with Blue Origin has revealed a near-perfect replica of the New Shepard rocket that Bezos traveled in, and it's available for purchase for $69.

The replica rocket is flyable and can even reach 400 feet in altitude when its launched using model rocket engines. In the above launch video for the model rocket, the YouTube comment section is taking aim at the design of the rocket as well as the price. Individuals said, "My sister has one of them in her drawer", "Does it come a 12 mini-fig lawyers to sue NASA with?", and "It also comes with a vibrating mode that simulates the ignition and launch even in a wet and rainy day."

Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos have been invited by Russia's space agency to join them at the launch of Soyuz MS-19.

Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin invited the three space entrepreneurs to the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the launch of one of the space agency's most anticipated missions, Soyuz MS-19. Rogozin invited Musk, Branson, and Bezos on Russia's Channel One, while also revealing the mission will include a director, an actress, and a filmmaker that will shoot a movie aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Rogozin backed up his invitation on Twitter, saying, "On October 5, a new expedition will leave for the International Space Station. We are planning to send a cinematographic group of the leading television channel as part of it. If you succeed, I would be glad to see you on October 5 in the cradle of world cosmonautics - at the Baikonur cosmodrome." The movie that will be shot over a week aboard the ISS is titled "Vyzov", which translates to "Challenge".