Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 81

Worldwide lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic provided NASA and other institutions new insight into how everyday human activity impacts the atmosphere.

One study led by researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tracked drops in nitrogen oxide emissions during global lockdowns. Nitrogen oxide is commonly produced in car exhaust and from power plants, where it goes on to react in the air to produce ozone. They found about a 2% drop globally in ozone concentrations in the lower atmosphere, a decrease that would be otherwise achievable in about 15 years with even highly aggressive emission restrictions.

A second study focused on carbon dioxide emissions, where they were able to identify local drops and upticks in carbon dioxide emissions, tied with lockdowns and some easing of restrictions months later, respectively. They could also separate local, human-related emissions from those originating from natural sources, such as the 2019-2020 Australian bushfires.

An object, designated WE0913A, crashed into the Moon's surface on March 4th, 2022, after much debate over its origin.

The object is a rocket body and was identified to be on a collision course with the Moon in late 2021. Following the crash, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted the collision site. Rather than one isolated impact crater, the rocket body created a double crater near the Hertzsprung crater, creating an eastern 18-meter (~19.5 yards) diameter crater overlapping a western crater with a 16-meter diameter (~17.5 yards).

The double crater suggests that the rocket body had large masses concentrated at either end. A typical spent rocket with most of its mass concentrated at the motor end and an empty fuel tank comprises most of the remaining rocket body. However, the identity of the rocket is still unknown, so the double crater may help narrow down its origin. No other rocket body that has impacted the Moon has created a double crater.

The Mechazilla tower at SpaceX's Starbase facility in Texas has finally been used for its intended purpose.

SpaceX's Super Heavy Booster 7, equipped with 33 Raptor engines, was transported across Starbase to the orbital launch pad where the 440-foot (134 meters) tall Mechazilla launch tower is located. This clip from NASASpaceFlight shows the moment when Mechazilla's two large robotic arms, dubbed" Chopsticks," were used to grab and lift SpaceX's Booster 7. The tower then rotated the booster around slowly, before placing it onto the launch pad.

Elon Musk has said that SpaceX's Starship will be ready to fly in July, now that Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) assessment of Starbase and Starship is complete. With Booster 7 in place, a full Starship stack assembly by placing the Starship spacecraft atop the booster won't be far off, creating an almost 400-foot (121.9 meters) tall stack, bringing SpaceX one step closer to its first and long-awaited orbital flight test.

Andrew McCarthy has captured an image of the International Space Station (ISS) as it transits across the Moon.

Using a camera capturing at a rate of 155 frames per second, McCarthy created a video of the space station transiting across the lunar surface, with the Eratosthenes, Copernicus, Kepler, and Aristarchus craters all visible beneath it. The video is slowed down by about 12 times, as the ISS was only in frame for roughly a quarter of a second. McCarthy woke up at 1:30 am to capture the image, with both the Moon and ISS lit by the Sun.

The full-size image showing the majority of the Moon with the ISS transiting between the camera and the Moon is a mosaic compiled from smaller images making up the rest of the scene. A secondary camera captured the color data, and the image itself is available for purchase as a print on McCarthy's website.

A study on the ability titled "Human Echolocators Have Better Localization Off Axis" has been published in the journal Psychological Science.

A 2021 study by researchers from Durham University showed that humans could learn to navigate using echolocation in only ten weeks. Echolocation is used notably by bats, which create sounds and listen to how the sound waves echo around in the environment and use that information to determine the layout of their immediate surroundings.

Researchers demonstrated echolocating abilities in individuals with their sight intact and sight-challenged individuals, all of whom could navigate through mazes more easily and roughly ascertain an object's size and shape by making clicking noises with their tongues. New research shows that echolocation is most precise when objects are presented at a 45-degree angle to an observer rather than directly in front of them.

A former NASA administrator has said that Elon Musk was motivated to start SpaceX after a Russian engineer literally spat on him.

The former NASA administrator is Lori Garver, who wrote in her memoirs how Elon Musk drew his inspiration to create SpaceX, and that the now richest individual in the world decided to launch after he was disrespected by a Russian in 2001. Garver described the incident between Musk and the engineer in "Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age," which was recently published on June 21.

Garver wrote that the act of spitting on his shoes "completely offended" Musk, and that on his flight back home, he decided he was going to create his own rocket company that would eventually be their competition. Garver described the incident as "If Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships, this was the spit that launched a thousand spaceships."

Astronomers have sifted through data acquired by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and have honed in on one star called G238-44.

A team of astronomers looked through Hubble data, along with other observations from various NASA telescopes, and studied the white dwarf star G238-44. The analysis researchers found evidence of a water reservoir after they scanned the elemental properties of the white dwarf star. This led the team to believe that the star must be siphoning debris from nearby objects.

For those that don't know, a white dwarf star is a star that was once like our sun, but it has exhausted all of its nuclear energy. The closest white dwarf star to our sun is Sirius B, located approximately 8.6 light years away. As for G238-44, the astronomers believe that the corpse star is siphoning material from a nearby asteroid belt as well as icy celestial bodies, which leads the researchers to suggest that water may be more common in distant planetary systems than initially anticipated.

Reports have surfaced regarding the Biden administration seeking advice from Elon Musk's Tesla on climate policies.

The reports indicate that President Joe Biden's administration has tried to get into contact with Elon Musk's Tesla to discuss new climate policies that will allow for electric vehicle manufacturers to receive some form of climate subsidy. White House officials, along with Tesla executives, have reportedly met on several occasions to discuss policy changes that were linked to the Renewable Fuel Standard - a federal policy that requires a certain percentage of fuel sold throughout the US to be renewable.

Reuters reports that Tesla and the White House are discussing a way to include electric vehicles in the Renewable Fuel Standard. These discussions between Tesla and the White House reportedly date back to Biden's first day of office, where he is said to have attempted communication with Musk/Tesla. As for Tesla itself, Musk described the hardships of running a car manufacturing company and said that the company is entirely focused on avoiding bankruptcy.

NASA has taken to its blog to give an update on the progress being made on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The next-generation space telescope was launched on December 25, 2021, and after arriving in its designated location, it has been performing calibrations to meet the required levels of performance needed to achieve its science goals.

NASA writes on its blog that the space telescope performed two additional mirror alignment steps in March 2022 and that the Webb team can now confirm that the telescope's optical performance has now reached, and in some instances surpassed, the levels required for coming science missions. NASA explains that the below image was taken using a special lens inside of Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument, which was specifically designed to snap images of the space telescopes' mirrors and not the stars.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) are collaborating to bring nuclear power generation to space, particularly the Moon.

The two agencies have awarded contracts to three companies, each valued at roughly five million dollars. The money is to be put toward design concepts for a "40-kilowatt class fission power system planned to last at least 10 years in the lunar environment." The selected companies are Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, and a joint venture between Intuitive Machines and X-Energy called IX, and their work will benefit NASA's future Artemis missions.

The nuclear fission systems could be ready to launch and land on the Moon by the decade's end to demonstrate their viability. A fission system would be smaller and more lightweight than other power systems and could provide power regardless of location, access to sunlight, or other environmental conditions. Developing technology for fission surface power systems will also help NASA facilitate development of nuclear propulsion systems for rockets.

Multiple photographers have captured the phenomenon unwittingly, as it is invisible to the naked eye.

The phenomenon is known as space jellyfish, and occurs when sunlight reflects off of plumes of exhaust gases from recently launched rockets, particularly later in the evening or in the early morning. The phenomenon has been observed more frequently as more launches occur, and with the advent of reusable rockets, exhaust gases are also present when a rocket fires its engines as it returns to the ground.

Photographer David Johnston was capturing shots of the Milky Way on the night of June 19th when he noticed a large red spot in one of his photos, ruining his picture. It proceeded to grow in subsequent images, dominating the sky, despite being invisible without the camera. A friend of Johnston's suggested a rocket launch could be responsible. Coincidentally, SpaceX had launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets, carrying a Globalstar satellite minutes before when Johnston first noticed the red appear in the sky.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) satellite has photographed strange polygonal structures covering the Martian landscape.

The image was captured by the MRO using the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, and high resolution versions up to 10K are available on the HiRISE website. The Martian surface pictured is divided into numerous polygonal sections by water that freezes into ice in the ground, splitting the soil. Dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) sublimates into a gaseous form in the springtime, further fracturing the boundaries of the polygons.

Dry ice covers the visible ground, and various vents form across the surface as the temperature rises, allowing gas to escape while eroding other particles that are then carried along with the gas. These particles are carried a short distance, creating dark, fan-shaped deposits. The vents occasionally close and reopen, though a change in wind direction produces a second fan-shaped deposit extending in another direction.

A study on the levitation technique titled "High-speed acoustic holography with arbitrary scattering objects" has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers from the University College London (UCL) have developed a self-correcting acoustic levitation system, which can levitate objects by firing sound waves at them, essentially just by pushing them with air particles. Before their system, if something came between the speakers and the levitated object, the flow of air particles causing levitation would be interrupted, and the object would fall.

To account for this, the research team increased the number of speakers to 256 in a grid, all controlled by software to allow the array to shape sound waves to achieve the desired result. When something blocked sound waves from some speakers, other speakers' sound waves could be redirected to keep the object levitated. The researchers levitated water, small beads, and a piece of fabric with various interfering objects.

A large sunspot that is estimated to be three times the size of Earth is rapidly growing, doubling in size in just 24 hours.

The large sunspot called AR3038 is being monitored by officials, and according to SpaceWeather.com, it has grown to an enormous size of three Earth's and is expected to produce a medium-sized solar flare sometime in the future. Notably, the sunspot is Earth-facing, meaning that if a solar flare was to occur, Earth could be hit with an intense wave of electromagnetic radiation. Solar flares are often, but not always, accompanied by a coronal mass ejection (CME), which is a blast of charged particles that interacts with Earth's atmosphere.

The interaction between the charged particles and Earth's atmosphere can cause geomagnetic storms that can result in disruptions for GPS, radio communication, satellites, and even radio blackouts. More positively, a CME impact can also cause auroras to appear in the night sky, which is a result of the aforementioned interaction between the charged particles from the Sun and Earth's atmosphere. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitors the risk of coming solar flares and CMEs, and at the time of reporting, it hasn't issued any warnings regarding sunspot AR3038.

Viewing pornography in China is a crime, and authorities have used artificial intelligence (AI) and "porn appraisers" to flag questionable content.

Researchers from China's Beijing Jiaotong University have created a device that can detect pornography when a man is watching it by "reading his mind." In an experiment involving fifteen male university students aged 20 to 25, a device worn on the head detected spikes in brainwave activity whenever an explicit image appeared on a computer screen in front of the wearer.

The device is a proof-of-concept for human-machine collaboration in detecting explicit imagery, catching what AI misses, and assisting porn appraisers, or jian huang shi, that professionally scour and censor content, and are much more accurate than AI, but cannot continuously carry out the task. A peer-reviewed paper on the prototype device was published on June 13th in the Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation.

The recent wet dress rehearsal was NASA's first successful attempt after various problems thwarted three previous ones.

The last hurdle in validating NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for its upcoming Artemis I mission was scrapped on previous occasions due to technical issues, including a fuel leak and stuck valves, and a hydrogen leak almost delayed the latest attempt. Despite this, NASA went ahead with a wet dress rehearsal on June 20th, 2022, and completed a mock countdown procedure down to T-29 seconds.

The wet dress rehearsal marked the first time the SLS rocket's propellant tanks were all fully loaded, and engineers could test launch-day conditions in rapid succession. To circumvent the hydrogen leak that arose in preparation for the attempt, launch controllers found a way to mask the data the leak would send to the launch computer to allow them to continue the test as far into the countdown as possible.

The United States' first human trial of CRISPR gene-editing technology has been ongoing since 2019.

The trial sought to treat two rare blood diseases, beta-thalassemia and sickle cell disease (SCD). CRISPR was used to make a single genetic change to stem cells harvested from a patient's blood, designed to lead to higher fetal hemoglobin levels in red blood cells, before re-administering the stem cells to the patient.

The treatment effectively cured the first two patients to receive it in a matter of months, and follow-up results from about two years in showed completely successful treatments in 22 patients. Seven of those 22 patients were a year past their first treatment, which was still proving effective.

China has recently outlined the nations plans to return samples from Mars back to Earth, and it believes it can do it much faster than NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

For context, NASA, partnered with the ESA, is planning on returning a selection of samples from the Red Planet that involves a complex method of landing a second spacecraft next to the Perseverance rover to hand off the samples. The second spacecraft, which is planned to launch in 2026 and arrive on Mars in 2028, will deploy a rover that will collect the samples from Perseverance and transport them to the Mars ascent vehicle, which is a small rocket that will launch from the surface of Mars.

The small rocket will then sync up with a third nearby spacecraft that will collect the samples and then transport them back to Earth sometime in 2033. Now, that is NASA and the ESA's plan on getting the first Mars samples back to Earth, and while it seems somewhat convoluted, it's the best plan the agencies could come up with given the timeframe.

SpaceX has set a new record for the most reuses of a single Falcon 9 rocket booster.

On Friday, June 17th, SpaceX launched 53 Starlink satellites from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida before launching a radar satellite for the German military from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California the following day. With a third Falcon 9 launch at 04:27 UTC on June 19th from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) in Florida, SpaceX has launched three rockets within 36 hours, and all safely made it back to Earth.

The first of the three missions saw SpaceX break its rocket-reuse record, as the Falcon 9 first-stage booster used in the mission flew for the thirteenth time. The booster has flown for the launches of GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, and now a total of ten Starlink missions.

A study on the Lac-Phe molecule titled "An exercise-inducible metabolite that suppresses feeding and obesity" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine, Stanford School of Medicine, and other institutions have identified an exercise-induced molecule that appears in the blood of mice during exercise. The molecule is a modified amino acid, Lac-Phe, synthesized from lactate and phenylalanine. Lac-Phe was found to suppress food intake by roughly 50%, without affecting their overall energy expenditure or activity.

Lac-Phe also contributed to lowered overall food intake, reduced body weight, primarily due to a reduction in body fat, and improved glucose tolerance when administered over ten days. An enzyme called CNDP2 was also identified, used in the production of Lac-Phe, and was shown to be critical in weight loss from exercise.