Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 209

Back in March, NASA were planning on doing the first all-female spacewalk but unfortunately had to cancel due to a lack of correct spacesuits aboard the flying lab. Now, NASA and both astronauts have announced a spacewalk will commence on October 21st.

The first planned spacewalk was cancelled due to the spacesuits not correctly fitting rookie astronaut Anne McClain. Since the astronauts are in micro-gravity their bodies slightly stretch, and even though the suits were fitted in a pool before take-off, the measurements can be a little bit off once they get out to the lab.

Since the fitting issue of the suits has now been resolved and the safety of the astronauts has been upheld to the highest extent, both Christina Koch and Jessica Meir have announced via Twitter that they will participate in replacing the solar batteries aboard the lab. Koch and Meir say that they have five spacewalks planned for the future and that any combination of astronauts aboard the station will be participating. The astronauts will be replacing old nickel-hydrogen batteries with brand new next-gen lithium-ion batteries that are expected to last the remainder of the International Space Stations life.

I'm not saying it was aliens... but this story, I don't even know what else could've caused this BUT aliens. Anyway, in remote eastern Oregon at the Silvies Valley Ranch, mutilated cattle were found with their tongues and genitals surgically removed, without a single drop of blood found.

No evidence of how the cattle were mutilated, or how they were able to be drained of blood without a single drop hitting the ground have been explained. Silvies Valley Ranch vice president, Colby Marshall, drove down one of the roads towards the mysteriously slain cattle, where he said: "Then we'll get out and take a little walk to where one of the bulls was found. And the carcass is still there".

The bulls, in the words of NPR, "looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out".

We all use lithium-ion batteries on the daily, whether it's our smartphones, tablets and other devices -- with some of the creators of the rechargeable battery technology being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

M. Stanley Whittingham, John Goodenough, and Akira Yoshino were part of the team that contributed towards the development of lithium-ion battery technology, and without them (and who they worked with, and those after) we would be stuck in the dark... and in some cases, literally. Especially with flashlights being part of a smartphone now thanks to the rear-facing camera and LED flash, all powered by lithium-ion batteries.

Experiments on replacing the then-used lead-acid batteries began in the 1950s and 1960s, with M. Stanley Whittingham partnering with Fred Gamble "showed in 1976 that lithium ions, after donating electrons to produce a charge, fit perfectly into a lattice of titanium disulfide - where they sit patiently (in their "van der Waals gaps") until an electron is provided during recharging. Unfortunately this design also used a lithium anode that could be highly reactive (think fire) if bent or crushed", reports TechCrunch.

DJI has made a significant push in reinforcing the importance of STEM. STEM for those who are not aware is the educational system focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Many schools have adopted STEM education and push forward on educating those interested in working in the science in engineering fields where many of these skills are valuable.

The Robomaster S1, as DJI has labeled the STEM learning kit, is, in essence, something you will need to build and program yourself. The Robomaster S1 looks like a mini version of a rover like we have sent into space to explore different planets. While this specific robot may not be tasked with exploring extraterrestrial bodies, it can explore and even attack terra firma here on Earth.

The Robomaster S1 comes in pieces (many of them), and you must assemble it to build your ground-dwelling or rolling, in this case, mobile robot soldier. Now as you can see the reason I say soldier or attack is that the Robomaster S1 may look cute and friendly, it comes with a gel bead firing blaster and even LED targeting lights to help map the projectile trajectories.

Back in January, China launched their Chang'e-4 spacecraft to the dark side of the moon. Now that spacecraft, and the potential life it contains has sprouted leaves.

China's Chang'e-4 spacecraft housed six life forms on the lunar surface: potato seeds, cotton seeds, rapeseeds, yeast, fruit fly eggs and Arabidopsis thaliana, a common weed. Also aboard the spacecraft was a mini-biosphere called the Lunar Micro Ecosystem (LME). This biosphere re-created Earth-like conditions excluding factors such as micro-gravity and cosmic radiation.

All of the other seeds died besides the cotton, and according to a new 3D reconstruction, the cotton planet grew not one but two leaves before it also died due to cold temperatures. The cotton leaves lasted about two weeks before falling into their cold fate, and from these findings China plans to continue studying how various life forms might be able to survive on the moon.

A new research team who was observing Saturn has found 20 more moons orbiting the planet, bringing the total number of moons circling Saturn to 82, surpassing Jupiters 79.

The research team led by Carnegie's Scott S. Sheppard observed 20 new moons, each of them are about five kilometers in diameter. 17 of the moons obit the planet backwards, meaning that their obital rotation is backwards when compared to the way the planet is spinning. The remaining three moons orbit with Saturn in the same direction.

The new moons were discovered using the Sabaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Scott Sheppard said that "Using some of the largest telescopes in the world, we are now completing the inventory of small moons around the giant planets. They play a crucial role in helping us determine how our Solar System's planets formed and evolved." Last year when Sheppard and his team discovered 12 new moons orbiting Jupiter they hosted and online naming contest for 5 of them, they will be doing the same thing for Saturn's newly found moons.

California has passed a new law that will see the banning of creating and distributing deepfake pornography videos of persons who have not consented to the video being made.

According to a study, 96% of deepfake videos found online come under the pornographic category and with more and more deepfake pornographic videos being released, California has decided to put in place some new laws to protect people. This new law will see statutory damages ranging between $1,500 and $30,000, and if malice is demonstrated throughout the video creation, damages can rise to $150,000.

With laws now in place, apps such as Fake App which allowed users to create their own deepfake porn video and post it onto Twitter, Facebook and Reddit will be stopped in their tracks. Fake App was so simple to use that fake porn videos of high profile people such as Daisy Ridley, Gal Gadot, Emma Watson, Jessica Alba circled the internet. Back in July, the House of Representatives considered federal measures to ban the distribution of deepfake videos to protect the legitimacy of the upcoming election.

NASA are currently working their way towards developing a brand new electric aircraft that could stand as a fuel-and-cost efficient alternative to normal commercial aircrafts.

At the moment, commercial air travel accounts for an approximate 4 to 9% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gases, that number is also on the rise as more and more planes enter our atmosphere. NASA plans to nip that problem in the bud with a new electric aircraft design that utilizes light-weight and compact inverters. Inverters are the central component in an electric system and provide power to the electric motor.

Traditionally, the requirement of these inverters comes with the diminishing return of how large and bulky they are, and since weight is such a critical factor in aviation NASA have begun research into developing smaller and more power efficient inverters. NASA has signed a $12 million contract with General Electric to develop a new inverter the has the power of generating a megawatt of electricity, but is only the size of a brief case.

News has come out from the International Space Station (ISS) regarding the astronauts aboard completing the first of five spacewalks.

Astronauts Christina Koch and Andrew Morgan have just returned to the ISS after changing over a pair of old batteries. The astronauts were required to install a new pair of batteries that arrived at the ISS just this past week. The new batteries are lithium-ion, and are going to be a massive upgrade from the ISS' twelve old nickel-hydrogen batteries. The newly installed batteries are twice as good as the old ones, and are expected to last for the remainder of the ISS' life.

You are probably wondering what the batteries are powering, they are directly linked to the ISS' solar power network and since 2017 astronauts aboard the ship have been upgrading them. At the moment the astronauts aboard need to do another four more spacewalks to complete the transition from the old batteries to the new. The new batteries are so powerful that one is needed for every two of the old ones. Best of luck for the remainder of the spacewalks!

A new announcement has revealed that in 2021, the Nova-C lander will be hitching a ride aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket that's headed to the Moon.

SpaceX will be using their Falcon 9 rocket for a planned Moon landing in 2021, and the NASA-sponsored flight will also have on board the Nova-C lunar lander that was built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines. According to Intuitive Machines representatives, the Nova-C has the ability of carrying 100 kilograms, or 220lbs of cargo anywhere on the lunar surface.

For the 2021 mission in particular, the Nova-C will have payloads from NASA as well as some other customers to fill out the rest of the available room. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement, "We're honored that Intuitive Machines selected Falcon 9, SpaceX's tried-and-true workhorse, for this pioneering mission to the moon. Our partnership with Intuitive Machines is a great example of two private companies working together with NASA to advance space exploration."

The InSight lander that is currently on Mars has relayed back to Earth some amazing audio sounds that scientists believe to be Marsquakes and other martian sounds.

NASA's InSight lander has managed to capture more than 100 events on its radar, but its estimated that only out of these 100 events that 21 of those are marsquake potentials. InSight's seismometer which is what was used to capture this evidence is so impressively sensitive that it can also pick up the sound of wind on the distant planet.

Imperial College London's Constantinos Charalambous who assisted with the audio recordings said commented on the video, saying "It's been exciting, especially in the beginning, hearing the first vibrations from the lander. You're imagining what's really happening on Mars as InSight sits on the open landscape."

Scientists have been observing our solar system for quite some time now, and throughout their observations we have noticed some space objects affected by strange gravitational pulls.

While there are many different theories for why these space objects have had their trajectory affected by an anonymous gravitational pulls, a new theory has suggested that there could be an primordial black hole (PBH) located somewhere in our solar system. This black hole wouldn't be like the one that is located at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy, as that black hole is a 'supermassive' one.

If there is a black hole hiding out somewhere in our solar system it would only be around five centimeters in radius, but still have five times Earth's mass. Due to the black holes size and gravitational pulling power, Astronomers Jakub Scholtz of Durham University and James Unwin of University of Illinois at Chicago believe that it could be located much closer than we originally think. The paper suggests that instead of thinking that there is a mysterious Planet Nine effecting the space objects, that this PBH could be the answer astronomers have been looking at for years.

NASA has announced that they are now funding more than a dozen technology projects that could assist with their future plans of landing back on the Moon and Mars.

The funding is sourced from NASA's Artemis Program which plans on landing humans back on the Moon by 2024. According to Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, "These are important technologies necessary for sustained exploration of the moon and Mars. These promising technologies are at a 'tipping point' in their development, meaning NASA's investment is likely the extra push a company needs to significantly mature a capability."

Some of the companies that are lucky enough to be able to receive the funding are Amazon owner, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin which is focussing on cryogenic technology. NASA will be giving Blue Origin the largest chunk of money to test out a new way of cooling hydrogen and oxygen into liquid fuel. The eventual hopes of Blue Origin is to be able to establish and design a new system that can produce fuel on the moon based on this technology.

Firstly, rest-in-peace star ASASSN-19bt. Now that the sentiments are over, NASA has recently caught a cosmic crime in the act as a black hole some 375 million light-years away has eaten a fellow star.

The star was known as ASASSN-19bt and was observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS for short. The satellite provided scientists and researchers a viewing at what happens when a star is torn apart by a black holes extreme gravitational pull. This cosmic level collision is labelled as a tidal disruption event or TDE, which is when a black hole begins the process of tearing the gas from the star before it eventually forms into an accretion disk.

Astronomer Thomas Holoien said "Only a handful of TDEs have been discovered before they reached peak brightness, and this one was found just a few days after it started to brighten." He continued and said "This makes ASASSN-19bt the new poster child for TDE research. Having so much data about ASASSN-19bt will allow us to improve our understanding of the physics at work when a star is unlucky enough to meet a black hole."

A new study has claimed that there is about 1,000 water-rich or "hydrated" asteroids that are prime for harvesting, and mining them would be easier than landing back on the moons surface and harvesting the lunar poles.

Andrew Rivkin, an asteroid researcher at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Research Laboratory in Maryland and lead author on the paper said that "Most of the hydrated material in the near-Earth population is contained in the largest few hydrated objects". Rivkin also suggested that if we were to land on these asteroids, and somehow established a connection line back to Earth massive profits could be made.

It is estimated that out of the 1,000 water-rich asteroids that more than 25 of them are large enough to provide more than a significant amount of water. Space.com says that the indicated asteroids contain enough water to fill 320,000 Olympic-size swimming pools and is much more water than both the Lunar poles. If there was a way to successfully establish refueling stations on these orbiting asteroids, human space exploration could unlock a 'level-up' moment as there would be no need to send fuel from Earth anymore.

Elon Musk must be sipping champagne by now, with SpaceX hitting a new milestone in its Starship and Super Heavy rockets with the first fully-assembled Starship MK1 shown off.

This is the Starship MK1 in all of its engineering glory, the first prototype that has been shown off by SpaceX as part of its continued foray into interplanetary transportation systems. Starship MK1 uses SpaceX's own Super Heavy rocket system that will see payloads delivered to both the Moon, and in future missions, to Mars.

Where the new Starship takes things to the next level is that it uses an in-space re-filling by propellant -- with the Starship docking with tanker Starship vessels to re-fuel before taking off for their larger destination -- Mars, and other planets in and around our solar system. The additional fuel is required for the large amount of supplies and passengers, of which we're talking supplies to build bases on other planets (like Mars) and up to 100 passengers.

Astrophysicists out of the College of Charleston have issued a new paper that has been published in The Astrophysical Journal suggesting something can move faster than the speed of light.

One of the core principles of physics is Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which states that no object can move faster than the speed of light. This is because when an object is moved it requires energy, and as an object is moved faster and faster its mass grows becoming 'heavier' requiring more energy. So when an object reaches close to the speed of light (299792458 meters per second) its mass is almost infinite making it impossible to surpass this speed.

Jon Hakkila and Robert Nemiroff aren't going against Einstein's established ruling, but what they have found is that gamma rays that are blasting out of a blazar (an active galactic nucleus with a relativistic jet. Above image) surpass the speed of light in surrounding gas clouds. This would make these gamma-ray jets superluminal. It was found that this isn't the case in a vacuum, meaning that Einstein's theory still holds solid cosmological ground. Here is what Hakkila said "Standard gamma-ray burst models have neglected time-reversible light curve properties. Superluminal jet motion accounts for these properties while retaining a great many standard model features."

NASA has issued out a new visualization that illustrates to viewers how a black hole warps its surroundings. The image is located below.

Above we have the image released by NASA, and they explain that we can see where the black holes extreme gravitational pull has managed to pull in large amounts of matter that form into a thin structure called an accretion disk. It is also detailed that due to the black holes gravitational pull that light cannot even escape its draw, skewing the rays from all different directions and resulting in the strange shape we observe.

Closest to the center of the black hole is gas which form knots that and dissipate and re-form as the accretion disks magnetic fields change. At the bottom center of the black hole we can see what is called a "photon-ring" which is composed of multiple rings of light that have been bent. These rings will grow progressively fainter as time goes on due to the light circling the black hole many times and eventually not being able to reach our eyes. Here is the first-ever image of real-life black hole.

The Soyuz 61 crew recently took off from Earths surface yesterday, and upon arrival at the International Space Station (ISS) a crew member of the ISS snapped this awesome picture.

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka and United Arab Emirates spaceflight participant Hazza AlMansoori launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 25th. It wasn't long before they were to join the ISS crew of six that has been living and conducting experiments aboard the flying lab/observatory. Jessica Meir was on route to join her best-friend and classmate Christina Koch and upon Meirs arrival Koch snapped this incredible picture.

"What it looks like from @Space_Station when your best friend achieves her lifelong dream to go to space". She continued and explained what the image is of "Caught the second stage in progress! We can't wait to welcome you onboard, crew of Soyuz 61!" Meir and Skripochka will stay on board the ISS until February next year, while AlMansoori will return back to Earth in just week since he is just a spaceflight participant.

Boston Dynamics have finished up some designs of their robot dog 'Spot' and have decided to put him to work. Companies can now join their leasing program to acquire their very own Spot robot.

You have perhaps seen Boston Dynamics' robot dog before, and since its original reveal calibrations have been made that allow for Spot to avoid obstacles much better and keep balance under not-so-good circumstances. Why would companies want their very own Spot? Spot can carry up to four hardware modules on his back, which gives companies room to equip Spot with whatever it needs to complete its task. An example of a task is Spot being trained to check gas leaks with a methane detector.

Other use cases could be a company wanting to track connectivity over a long distance, Spot can be equipped with a radio transmitter and set on a specific course. Spot is also capable of also working in the rain. There are many different use cases for Spot, but one of them is something that Michael Perry, VP of business development at Boston Dynamics doesn't want to see, and thats Spot being converted into some sort of weapon. Here is what he had say, "Fundamentally, we don't want to see Spot doing anything that harms people, even in a simulated way".