Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 44

NASA's Mars helicopter has taken its 51st flight, and throughout, it has snapped an incredible photograph of the Martian landscape, which features Ingenuity's companion Mars rover, Perseverance, and a mysterious shiny object.

The Mars helicopter, which has impressed NASA engineers time and time again, took off from the surface of the Red Planet on April 22 to embark on its 51st flight. From an altitude of 40 feet, Ingenuity snapped the above photo showing the desolate Martian landscape, with a curious and motionless Perseverance located in the top left-hand corner of the frame. Given the distance between Ingenuity and Perseverance, along with the dusty environment, NASA's newest Mars rover blends into the background and could easily be mistaken for a distant Martian rock.

The image was posted to the NASA JPL Twitter account on April 24 and explained that during Ingenuity's 51st flight, the helicopter was airborne for 136.9 seconds, traveled a horizontal distance of 617 feet at 8.9 mph, and reached a maximum altitude of 40 feet. So, what's NASA doing with a helicopter on the surface of Mars? Ingenuity was originally sent to Mars to test if it was possible to design an aircraft capable of flying on another planet. The initial objective was quickly achieved by Ingenuity thanks to its specially designed rotors that rotate 10 times faster than what is required to fly on Earth.

A Japanese company that's attempting to land the first private spacecraft on the surface of the Moon may have failed their mission, or at the very least, it's not looking good.

ispace launched its Hakuto-R spacecraft on the back of SpaceX's Falcon 9 in December 2022 and has been in a circular orbit around the Moon for quite some time. ispace announced that it was expecting that Hakuto-R would touch down on the surface of the Moon on April 25 after sharing some photos of the Moon and Earth that were snapped by the lander as it continued its long orbit.

ispace selected the northeastern quadrant of the Moon for its designated landing site as the location filled all necessary mission requirements, such as a viable surface for the spacecraft's landing technology, scientific exploration objectives, and various other objectives. The Japanese company took to its Twitter account and blog to write that the spacecraft was expected to land on the surface of the Moon at 1:40 am JST on April 26, 2023, but HAKUTO-R Mission Control Center located in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, is unable to confirm the success of the Lunar Lander.

SpaceX recently conducted its first orbital test flight of Starship, the rocket poised to be the transportation method astronauts will take to walk on the surface of Mars.

Starship's first orbital test flight took place on April 20, and only four minutes after liftoff, SpaceX was forced into initiating the flight termination sequence that resulted in the nearly 400-foot rocket exploding mid-air. The call to terminate the mission came after Starship's first-stage booster, Super Heavy, failed to detach from the second-stage spacecraft, causing the entire rocket to begin to tumble, lose altitude, and ultimately, fail its mission.

Despite this tragic ending, SpaceX employees, along with company CEO Elon Musk rejoiced at what was achieved in the short amount of time Starship was airborne, with Musk taking to Twitter to congratulate all SpaceX employees on a great launch. So, why was SpaceX happy even though Starship was intentionally exploded? It's simple, SpaceX, along with Elon Musk, believed there was about a 50/50 chance Starship would even make it off the launch pad. Additionally, SpaceX was just happy to see Starship reach a height above its launch tower.

A Japanese company will attempting to secure first place in successfully landing private spacecraft on the surface of the Moon.

The Japanese company is ispace, and the spacecraft that is scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Moon is called Hakuto-R, which was recently launched by SpaceX's workhorse launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 rocket. Hakuto-R was launched in December 2022 and is currently in a circular orbit around the Moon at approximately 62 miles above its surface. ispace took to its official Twitter account to share an image of the surface of the Moon at 62 miles. The image was captured by Hakuto-R's on-board camera at 4:32 am on April 15 (JST).

The images didn't stop there as ispace shared an image of the lander snapping a photograph of Earth during the recent solar eclipse. This image, which can be seen below, was also taken at approximately 62 miles above the surface of the moon. As for the landing, ispace has shared an image of its designated primary landing site, which is located in the northeastern quadrant of the Moon. According to ispace, this location meets all of the technical specifications of the lander's technology, scientific exploration objectives, and mission requirements for its other customers.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has experienced a glitch in its Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the instrument used to capture light in the wavelength range of 5 to 28 microns.

NASA has taken to its blog on its website to explain that during Webb's routine monthly performance monitoring and calibration check, NASA engineers noticed a discrepancy in the data Webb's MIRI instrument was observing and what has already been well documented. To calibrate Webb's instrument, NASA engineers compare the brightness of standard stars that have already been cataloged to what Webb's instruments are observing.

Throughout this process, the data discrepancy was discovered, and further analysis was conducted on MIRI's Medium Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) mode. NASA noticed that since Webb has been in operation, the amount of light being registered by MIRI's sensors when Webb is in the MRS mode has decreased. NASA notes that there is no risk to the MIRI instrument itself and that there has been zero impact on all other observation modes within MIRI and on Webb's other scientific instruments.

NASA's newest Mars rover, Perseverance, has turned its instruments on its scout helicopter Ingenuity, capturing an awesome close-up photograph of the first aircraft to fly on the surface of another planet.

Perseverance and Ingenuity touched down on the Red Planet in February 2021 and, since then, have been exploring the Jezero Crater in search of any signs of ancient microbial life. Perseverance, along with Ingenuity, make a tag team partnership that involves Ingenuity scouting ahead of the Mars rover to observe any viable locations for scientific operations, upcoming terrain, potential hazards, and strategic travel planning. With Ingenuity's reconnaissance data, NASA engineers are able to plan an optimized travel route for Perseverance.

Throughout its two-year stay on the Red Planet, Ingenuity has conducted 50 flights, which has completely blown past its primary mission objective of attempting just one flight. On April 16, 2023, Perseverance came within only 75 feet of Ingenuity, marking the closest meeting between the two explorers in nearly two years, according to NASA JPL. Perseverance pointed its Mastcam-Z at Ingenuity and snapped some photographs that were then color-corrected.

Last week SpaceX conducted its first orbital test flight of Starship, the rocket slated to be the transportation humans will take to walk on Mars.

After a very long road of development, SpaceX launched Starship on April 20 from SpaceX's seaside Starbase facility at Boca Chica Beach, South Texas. The 394-foot-tall rocket shocked onlookers as it engaged its thrusters and began climbing in altitude.

The rocket consists of two stages. The first stage is called Super Heavy and stands at 165-feet-tall, and features 33 Raptor engines that generate a staggering 16.5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which is twice NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the previous record holder for the most powerful rocket ever launched. Stacked atop Super Heavy is the second stage called Starship, which is where the rocket's payload will be stored along with any future astronauts.

China revealed more details about its Tianwen-3 mission at the International Conference of Deep Space Sciences in Hefei, Anhui province, on April 22, where it will send two rockets around 2030 and bring back 500 grams of Mars samples.

The mission will include launching two Long March 5 rockets at the end of the decade that will each be carrying a lander, ascent vehicle, orbiter, and return module. Spacenews reports that China will be leveraging the same technology that enabled the space agency to pull off the impressive entry, descent, and landing of the Zhurong rover on July 12, 2021. As for collecting Mars samples, China will be using the same robotic arm design as what was used in China's Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission.

The robotic arm will be able to drill into the surface of Mars and collect samples from as far as two meters (6.5 feet) below the surface. The space agency expects to bring back approximately 500 grams of Martian samples that will be analyzed for the presence of ancient microbial life. As for the landing part of the mission, China unveiled plans to develop either a six-legged crawling robot or an Ingenuity-inspired helicopter that will transport the samples to the two-stage ascent vehicle.

A team of researchers has analyzed the behavior of parrots that engaged in numerous video calls with other parrots.

The team published the new paper in the scientific journal Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and detailed a three-month-long experiment that involved eighteen parrots and many video call sessions. Each of the eighteen parrots were taught how to request and engage in video calls with other parrots in an effort to see if the parrot's quality of life would improve. The birds were first taught how to request a video call with another parrot by the ringing of a special bell.

The owner of the parrot would then present the bird with a tablet that showed images of other parrots involved in the experiment. The bird was then taught to select the friend it wished to talk to, and then the owner would engage the call. The team then watched the behavior of all the birds and found that despite the physical limitation of not being next to each other, the birds showed a significant improvement in their quality of life through singing together, showing each other items they had found, mirroring movements, attempting to groom each other, and even sleeping trying to sleep next to each other.

The recent surge in awareness around renewable energy through the abundant climate change concerns has led a startup company to put forward a very simple, yet nonetheless impressive, solution to one of renewable energy's biggest problems.

A new report from CNET has highlighted Switzerland-based startup Energy Vault and the two facilities its constructing. Above is an image of Energy Vault's very first large-scale building that's located in Rudong, China, just north of Shanghai. So, what are these buildings? Below is an image of a 24-ton brick that is made of compressed dirt. That block is then brought to the top of the building by an elevator powered by solar panels or wind turbines.

The heavy dirt brick will be approximately 300 feet up the side of the building, where it will then be slowly lowered by an automated system. As the brick is returning back down to the surface, it's spinning electrical power generators. Now picture this process on repeat with hundreds of 24-ton bricks, each generating an entire megawatt every six feet it's lowered. Essentially, Energy Vault has created a building that contains gravity batteries that are able to store 100 megawatt-hours of electricity, or at least the building near Shanghai can.

NASA is continuing on its long road of getting humans on the surface of Mars, and a part of that development journey is figuring out what it will be like for humans to live on the surface of the Red Planet - without actually stepping foot on it.

Mars already presents numerous challenges for human exploration, but one of NASA's biggest concerns is how humans will survive the long stays on the Red Planet once we manage to get there. In an effort to understand more about the surface of Mars and how humans will react to their restrictive living quarters, NASA has set up Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, which is a ground-based mission that is expected to begin in June at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The upcoming mission is just one of three planned Mars simulation missions and will include numerous challenges for the participants. NASA writes in its blog that participants will be faced with many real-world problems, such as limited resources, equipment failures, communication delays, environmental stressors, and more.

NASA has confirmed via its blog that a decommissioned satellite reentered Earth's atmosphere on April 19, 2023, almost 21 years after it was first launched.

The retired NASA satellite is called the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, or RHESSI for short. According to the space agency, RHESSI was decommissioned in 2018, and throughout its operational time, it assisted scientists in their pursuit to understand the physics behind solar flares. NASA writes that the Department of Defense confirmed the reentry of the 660-pound satellite was over the Sahara Desert region, near the Sudan-Egypt border.

Astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell took to Twitter to post an image of where the satellite, or at least parts of it, would have landed. Officials anticipated that most of the dead satellite would burn up on reentry and only a few components would make it to the surface. RHESSI was launched in 2002 aboard the Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus XL rocket and went on to conduct ground-breaking science with its imaging spectrometer.

SpaceX launched the rocket slated to be the transportation method that the first astronauts will use to walk on the surface of Mars.

It was only a few days ago I reported that Musk was planning on launching SpaceX's Starship this week, and that launch could have occurred on April 20 (4/20), a celebrated holiday by cannabis users and Elon Musk. The launch happened to land on the comical holiday, and Starship lifted off from its launch pad at SpaceX's seaside Starbase facility at Boca Chica Beach, South Texas, at 9:33 a.m EDT.

The 394-foot-tall rocket, the largest and most powerful ever built, was a sight to behold as it climbed in altitude thanks to its powerful 33 first-stage Raptor engines. However, only three minutes after liftoff Starship failed to separate from its Super Heavy booster, the first stage of the rocket. Since both parts of the vehicle were still attached, Starship began to tumble mid-flight, and approximately four minutes after takeoff, the 394-foot-tall rocket exploded, or as SpaceX likes to describe it, a "rapid unscheduled disassembly".

If you thought Elden Ring was hard on a standard controller, imagine trying to beat the game using a device that scans your brain signals and converts them to inputs.

Twitch streamer and psychology graduate Perrikaryal has attempted that very challenge, announcing that she was going to try and beat Elden Ring using nothing electroencephalogram (EEG), which monitors brain activity through sensor pads attached to her head. These sensor pads monitor her brain's electrical activity, and the device was trained to recognize specific states that were then bound to in-game inputs, such as the character's attack input.

Perrikaryal further explained how the device works and said the device can recognize what her brain activity looks like normally, when she is speaking to her viewers on stream, and when she is visualizing attacking or moving forward. For example, to move her character forward, Perrikaryal says she imagines pushing an object forward. The imaginary object doesn't need to be the same every time, but when the pushing motion is imagined, the in-game character responds within seconds, moving forward and then attacking an enemy.

College students from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will be sending the first US autonomous rover to the Moon.

The small rover called Iris was developed over three years by college students, faculty, and former students from the university. Over the course of NASA's 65 years of lunar exploration, the space agency has yet to land an autonomous rover on the surface of the Moon, but in May, as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, the 4.4-pound rover with wheels the size of bottle caps will begin its 60-hour-long mission exploring the surface of Moon.

What scientific operations will Iris be conducting on the Moon's surface? According to reports, Iris' mission involves taking a plethora of images of the lunar surface, mostly with the intention of capturing as much geological information as possible throughout its mission. Additionally, the small autonomous rover will be testing out new techniques for relaying its important data and photographs back to Earth. The small rover will launch on the United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket on May 4 alongside multiple lunar projects.

Two actively feeding supermassive black holes are on a slow collision course, according to recent observations made by astronomers and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers detailed the discovery in a new study, and according to the paper, the supermassive black hole collision took place in the early universe when it was just 3 billion years old. According to the Keck Observatory, researchers from the University of Illinois led the study, which has now been published in the scientific journal Nature. According to the study, the two supermassive black holes are embedded in their own galaxies, which are also colliding.

These two merging galaxies are called J0749+2255, and a faint variation in light detected by the Gaia telescope revealed there was much more going on than researchers initially anticipated. To get to the bottom of what was happening, researchers turned to a variety of different telescopes that observe the universe in different ways. The team used telescopes and arrays that observe in X-rays, radio, and optical light.

NASA has revealed the next director for its Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and at the swearing-in ceremony, fans noticed something peculiar about the book being used to take the oath.

NASA has taken to its blog to name Dr. Makenzie Lystrup as director of Goddard Space Flight Center. Lystrup will take over from Dave Mitchell effective immediately and will make history by becoming the very first female center director at Goddard. Before joining NASA, Lystrup was vice president and general manager of civil space at Ball Aerospace, where she was responsible for maintaining the company's portfolio of space systems across various scientific fields.

Within this position, Lystrup has made contributions to NASA endeavors such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Landsat 9, the Roman Space Telescope, and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). Looking at the above image, which was posted on NASA's website, NASA Watch's Keith Cowing spotted an interesting factoid. Lystrup was sworn in by NASA administrator Bill Nelson with her hand on a copy of Carl Sagan's 1994 "Pale Blue Dot" instead of a bible.

The milestone launch date is near for SpaceX's Starship, and if no new large problem presents itself between now and next week, we will see Starship attempt its very first orbital launch.

SpaceX has been preparing for this moment for quite some time, as development for Starship's first orbital flight test has been a strenuous road paved with many hindering issues. However, that road appears to be coming to an end as the company's CEO Elon Musk announced via his personal Twitter account that, based on development trends, Starship is eyeing its first orbital test for the third week of April - next week.

Musk has been talking about Starship's first orbital launch for months now, and in August 2022, the SpaceX CEO sat down for an interview on the Nelk Podcast, where he explained that Starship is the largest flying object ever made and that there is a real risk of the launch failing in a disappointing, but epic, explosion. Regardless of the possibilities of failure, movements at SpaceX's Starbase facility located in South Texas indicate the company is just about ready to give it their first crack as technicians last week stacked the Ship 24 upper-stage prototype on top of its Booster 7 first stage.

NASA's Webb space telescope has honed its extremely sensitive instruments on the seventh planet from the Sun, Uranus.

Uranus was deemed a top priority for investigation in the 2023-2033 Planetary Science and Astrobiology decadal survey, which aims at finding the most valuable holes in science and filling in those gaps with proposals for knowledge-gaining missions. NASA has now followed up on the requests of the survey by performing some quick observations on Uranus, revealing features of the planet that haven't been seen in a very long time. NASA has taken to its blog to explain the above image of Uranus that was captured with Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on February 6, 2023.

The image reveals a stunning view of Uranus' rings, with Webb's sensitive instruments managing to capture 11 out of the 13 known rings. Uranus is a unique planet in the solar system as it rotates on a roughly 90-degree angle, which causes the planet to experience extreme seasons as it goes through its long 84-year orbit around the Sun. NASA writes on its blog that because Uranus rotates on its side, one side of the planet's poles goes through years of sunlight while the other side remains in total darkness for an equal number of years.

It was only a few weeks ago that an Australian company cooked up a large meatball that was made using DNA from a wooly mammoth. Now, a competitor company in the cultured meat industry has revealed its upped the ante as its CEO has actually eaten a woolly mammoth burger.

Wooly mammoths were once one of the biggest animals to ever walk on the surface of Earth, and luckily for researchers, the remains of these giant creatures have been found encased in permafrost, resulting in many of their limbs, flesh, fur, and tissue being persevered. From these remains, researchers are able to extract the woolly mammoths' DNA sequence, which can then be combined with close relatives such as an elephant's DNA.

Australian lab-grown meat startup Vow combined the woolly mammoth myoglobin DNA sequence with elephant DNA and then inserted both into the cells of a sheep muscle. Researchers left the cells for several weeks, and they eventually grew into 400 grams of meat. It should be noted that myoglobins are the proteins of the meat, and in live animals, it stores oxygen, producing the red color that is seen in freshly cut meat. Interestingly, myoglobin proteins are responsible for the red color of the meat, not blood.