Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 210

A super-small and easily-fixed hole was discovered on the International Space Station in August 2018 by flight controllers, and now someone finally knows why.

Russia knows and it won't say what it was, with Russian space agency boss Dmitry Rogozin saying they know what it was but will not share the information with the US or NASA. Rogozin told attendees at a youth science conference: "We know exactly what happened, but we won't tell you anything".

It wasn't just the youth at the science fair that the Russian space agency boss was cold to, but also NASA -- in whom it is in direct partnership with along with the United States when it comes to the International Space Station. NASA boss Jim Bridenstine told the Houston Chronicle: "They have not told me anything. I don't want to let one item set (the relationship) back, but it is clearly not acceptable that there are holes in the International Space Station".

A new mineral has been found inside of a diamond at a volcanic site in South Africa, with Ph.D. student Nicole Meyer and a team of researchers from the University of Alberta making the discovery.

The new material is known as Goldschmidtite after the legendary geochemist Victor Moritz Goldschmidt, and was found atop the Koffiefontein mine in a volcanic dig site, inside of a diamond. Goldschmidtite is an interesting new mineral, and finding it must've felt like ten Christmas mornings at once for the team.

Meyer explained: "Goldschmidtite has high concentrations of niobium, potassium, and the rare earth elements lanthanum and cerium, whereas the rest of the mantle is dominated by other elements, such as magnesium and iron".

NASA has announced that they want to build a brand new space telescope to become the observer of the planet, this telescope would serve as a planetary defense instrument.

NASA has said that they have put away $150 million dollars of their budget to build this new telescope, and that if they did proceed to develop it that it would be able to track asteroids in Earths immediate neighborhood. Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen said during the Planetary Science Advisory Committee meeting today that "The goal is not to do everything for eternity. The goal is to do the right things as they pop up."

For the space telescope to be a ultility to the planet, it would need to be able to track the positioning of a multitude of different asteroids as well as take into account their size and projected routes. This new proposed NASA telescope would be able to do this and it could reach the skies as early as 2025. If the telescope does get approved and is launched, its believed that it would be able to find 65% of the undiscovered space objects currently floating around out in the ether.

I didn't think I'd be typing this today but here it goes -- a female walrus has attacked, and successfully sunk a Russian Navy rescue boat by a female walrus. The walrus was most likely protecting its young, explains the RGO.

The Altai was sent out by the Russian navy's North Fleet, which was sailing away towards Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic with researchers from the Russian Geographical Society on-board. In order to get to the Altai shore the crew had to get off the larger vessel and onto a smaller landing craft, which is when things got serious.

A female walrus appeared and attacked one of the expedition boats, sinking it. The research group explained: "Walruses attacked the participating boat. The boat sank, but the tragedy was avoided thanks to the clear actions of the squad leader. All the landing participants safely reached the shore".

U.S President, Donald Trump recently had a meeting with the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morison and discussed the future of space exploration.

During that meeting, Trump spoke openly about each of the countries roles that they will be playing when it comes to space exploration via the Moon and eventually Mars. He said that "We're stopping at the moon. The moon is actually a launching pad, That's why we're stopping at the moon. I said, 'Hey, we've done the moon. That's not so exciting.' So we'll be doing the moon. But we'll really be doing Mars."

Trump also reinstated that "We're going to Mars" and that U.S space program will eventually take them there, its just a matter of securing the Moon first. For those that didn't know, NASA plan on leaving Earth by 2024 as apart of their Artemis lunar mission, more on that here. Additionally, NASA will be working with other space exploration companies such as Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

According to NASA, their Pioneer Venus mission reached Venus back in 1978 and the craft discovered that Venus showed signs of past oceans on its surface.

Since that mission, NASA has discovered many more things about Venus' surface which gave them more data to be able to understand how the planet went from being "Earth-like" to what it is now. The data indicates that around 700 million years ago Venus experienced a Greenhouse Effect event that caused the now hot place it is. Which means that 2 to 3 billion years Venus could of had a habitable environment fit for life.

After the forming of Venus its development process was extremely similar to that of Earths, which means that the planets atmosphere at one stage consisted of a lot of carbon dioxide. Venus then went onto experience a massive outgassing event which is yet to be discovered by scientists. It is believed that this event was geological and was so massive that it caused 80% of the planet to resurface.

Australia has formed and alliance with the US in NASA's upcoming space missions aimed towards re-landing on the Moon and eventually Mars.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently announced that Australia will be become involved with the United States' Artemis lunar program that targets a Moon landing by 2024. The announcement came out of the NASA Headquarters at a ceremony that was held in Washington. NASA Deputy Administrator, Jim Morhard, and Head of the Australian Space Agency, Megan Clark sat down and signed the new agreement (image above).

The agreement states that Australia will contribute to aspects of the lunar mission that they have a mutual interest in, such as "robotics, automation, and remote asset management". Morrison also stated that he will attempt to triple the Australian Space Agency budget to support the Artemis mission as well as the Moon to Mars mission that is planned for the future. Jim Morhard said "We are honored by today's statement and the commitment of our friends from Australia to support us in our mission to return to the Moon by 2024 with the Artemis program".

Space agency across the world have decided its time that humans go back to Moon, not only are NASA planning lunar missions but so are Russia and China.

For those that didn't know, Russia was the first country to achieve a successful soft landing onto the Moon's surface, that was back in 1966. China within the last decade also managed to achieve a soft landing and now both Russia and China have agreed to work together for future lunar missions.

China's Chang'e 5 will be launching next year and it is designed to be China's first sample-return mission. After Chang'e 5, Chang'e 6 will fetch a sample from the lunar south pole in 2023, Chang'e 7 will do a more in-depth exploration in that area. Russia on the other hand is on a different schedule, according to Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos Space Agency, Russia plans involve a 2024 orbiter, a 2028 sample-return mission and human flights sometime in 2029 - 2030.

With NASA in full swing towards meeting their White House imposed goal of landing back on the Moon by 2024, one of the companies heads has actually doubted the projects success.

Kenneth Bowersox, who is an acting associate administrator for human exploration spoke to a Congressional subcommittee, saying that "I wouldn't bet my oldest child's upcoming birthday present or anything like that." For those that don't know, the Trump administration urged NASA back in March to speed up its Moon-landing plans by four years, solidifying the now 2024 landing date.

Bowersox continued and said that even though he doubts that NASA will be able to achieve the goal of landing back on the Moon by 2024, its still good that the space exploration company has a "aggressive goal." Speaking to U.S Rep. Bill Posey, R-Florida, Bowersox said "There's a lot of risk in making the date, but we want to try to do it."

A new technology is being trialed by police departments in the United States with a Spider-Man-style device that shoots out a tether, which fires out fast and entangles and restrains the suspect -- all without harm.

Tasers killed 49 people in 2018 so it makes sense to use a harmless method to subdue people, with the new 'BolaWrap' portable device firing an 8-foot (2.4m) bola-style tether that entangles a suspect at the waist, or around the legs.

Wrap Industries is behind the BolaWrap with company president Tom Smith explaining: "Whether it is a Taser, pepper spray, baton ... there's been this gap created by the courts requiring that a higher level of force be used at the appropriate time. This tool fits perfectly into that gap giving the officers another option to use before having to use that high level of force to end that conversation very early, very safely".

The Gateway Foundation is certainly an ambitious company, and while you have to respect their ambition there is just some things that might just be out of reach for the foreseeable future.

The Gateway Foundation is a company who has designed and plans to build a space hotel that comes fully equipped with artificial gravity, luxurious suites, restaurants, gyms and everything else that 5 star hotels come with. The outer space hotel is titled 'Von Braun' station and is said that it will comfortably house up to 450 people.

The image above is the current design of the hotel, and as you can see the space hotel will be a massive ring. The design choice of a ring is so that it can rotate in space which would then cause gravity to be felt by passengers closer to the outer rim. Tim Alatorre, senior design architect for the company spoke to CNN Travel and said "We're going to have a number of different recreation activities and games that'll highlight the fact that you're able to do things that you can't do on Earth."

Big rockets with big boosters mean that big precautions need to be taken. That's why NASA has equipped their new space launch pad with the ability to spray 1 million gallons of water within just one minute.

The new launch pad is for the upcoming Artemis 1 mission and has been titled Pad 39B. Since NASA are planning their Moon landing mission and want to ensure as much safety for the crew aboard the shuttle, the space agency has recently tested their dousing power in-case of an emergency. The test which just lasted a mere 30 seconds showcased that the pad can spray 450,000 gallons of water onto the parts of the launch pad that would experience the most heat/noise.

Nic Moss, Deputy Project Manager for the launchpad said that when the SLS rocket takes off it will be extremely loud, which is where the water comes in. "SLS will create about 176 decibels at liftoff, which is significantly louder than a jetliner", "the sheets of water created by the flow will curb that sound by knocking it down a few decibels."

The weird quantum world has puzzled researchers for quite some time now, but a team out of the Stevens Institute of Technology could be on the brink of getting a much better handle on it.

The team of researchers led by Yuping Huang, who is an associate professor of physics and director of the Center of Quantum Science and Engineering has brought the human race closer to unlocking quantum computing. The team has done this through implementing a nano-scale chip that facilitates quantum interactions with photons. This new method has been reported to work at very low energy levels which has suggested that it could be optimized for use in room-temperature quantum computing and secure quantum communication.

Huang's team fired a laser beam into a race-track-shaped microcavity carved into a sliver of crystal. As the light bounced around the confined race-track the photons interacted with each other, but uncontrollably. What changed everything was when the team introduced a chip made from lithium niobate on insulator, which is a material that interacts with light uniquely. The team then applied high voltage to the race-track and the chip and was able to tailor the way the photons moved around it.

The truth is out there -- and now the Pentagon and US Navy are admitting the existence of UFOs, or as they're now calling them -- unidentified aerial phenomenon.

Tucker Carlson covered the subject on his segment on Fox News, shocked that "no one is paying attention to this" as it is a "watershed moment". The military is now admitting it, and Carlson rightfully asks "why is this not page one news, everywhere?!"

Carlson reports that the US government "admitting they have no idea what these things are, they're probably not some Russian super-plane... and nobody is paying attention to this. This seems like a watershed moment. We have all this tape, with objects defying the known laws of physics right next to US military installations".

The word explosion is not what you want to hear when you read news about the smallpox virus, but an explosion has rocked Russia's State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology on Monday.

The facility is only one of two places on the planet that actually houses live smallpox samples on-hand, so an explosion has officials concerned. Russian news agency TASS reports that the explosion and post-explosion fire were caused during "routine maintenance" of the facility.

No hazardous pathogens were released, if you trust Russia that is, while one worker at the facility was injured in the explosion and is at a local hospital getting treated for burns.

We all know the world will not end because of climate change or global warming, or whatever they start blaming next year... but rather, ourselves. We will do it to the human race -- humans, and while it might not be us directly... we'll blow the world to sh*t indirectly.

Laura Nolan, an ex-Google staffer that resigned in 2018 over protesting having to work on a project that would see big changes to the US drone program -- has said that AI robots that aren't operated by humans, should be banned. Nolan said that robots that aren't human-controlled should be outlawed, in the same way chemical weapons are kept under control over an international treaty.

Nolan was hired by Google back in 2017 to work on Project Maven, which saw Google working with the US Department of Defense on the AI project. Over 3000 Google employees ended up signing a petition against the involvement between the search giant and the US DOD that would see improvements to drone strikes killing more people abroad.

Astronomers were going about their rounds in search for gravitational waves and stumbled across the biggest neutron star discovered to date.

The findings were published in Nature Astronomy and are from the National Science Foundation-funded NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center. Astronomers at the West Virginia University were using the Green Bank Telescope in Pocahontas County to observe the star which has been titled J0740+6620.

J0740+6620 is a rapidly spinning pulsar star that harbors 2.17 times the mass of the Sun which is staggering 333,000 times the mass of the Earth. What is most interesting though is that this neutron star is only 20-30 kilometers across, breaching the known limits of how massive and compact a single object can be without converting itself into a black hole. For more information about the recently discovered neutron star, check out this article here.

Being an Astronaut is no walk in the park, there is numerous different tests you must pass before you strap on a space suit and get blasted off to a nearby planet or Moon.

One of these tests is being able to operate confidently in low-gravity, so NASA has begun their low-gravity simulation training in a huge water tank at the Johnson Space Center. Since the Moon has much less mass than Earth, its gravitational pull is considerably less than Earths. In fact the Moon's gravity is exactly 83.3% less than Earths, meaning that when on the Moon an objects weight is reduced to 16.6% of what it would be on Earth.

While training in a water tank in weighted suits isn't a one-to-one simulation of the gravitational change, its the best we can do as a human race for the time being. NASA has given a statement regarding the training, "NASA astronauts wear weighted vests and backpacks to simulate walking on the Moon, which has one-sixth the gravity of Earth. Astronauts Drew Feustel and Don Pettit are among those training in the massive pool, which is used primarily to train astronauts for spacewalks aboard the International Space Station."

Last week India attempted landing on the moon and right before the country was about to achieve touchdown India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost communication with the craft.

Since India can't communicate with its Chandrayaan-2 lunar lander it has been assumed that the lander has collided with the moons surface in a crash landing. NASA has decided that they will be using the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's high-powered camera (LRO) to attempt to spot the crashed lander next week.

Noah Petro of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center said that "Per NASA policy, all LRO data are publicly available. NASA will share any before and after flyover imagery of the area around the targeted Chandrayaan 2 Vikram lander landing site to support analysis by the Indian Space Research Organization."

Imagine a future where you buy a car in no particular color, and then customize it instantly -- in real-time from your phone or a button in the car, to change the entire color scheme both inside and outside.

MIT is working on just that with researchers out of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) developing a reprogrammable ink that has been called PhotoChromeleon, for obvious reasons. It has a chameleon-like ability to change color, and does so using an specially-created ink.

This ink is sprayed onto something and then each color can be tweaked by activating and deactivating specific light sources. The team explains: "For example, if you use a blue light, it would mostly be absorbed by the yellow dye and be deactivated, and magenta and cyan would remain, resulting in blue. If you use a green light, magenta would mostly absorb it and be deactivated, and then both yellow and cyan would remain, resulting in green".