Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 89

New estimations show that the upcoming Jupiter-3 geostationary communications satellite will be the heaviest commercial geostationary satellite ever launched.

Jupiter-3, also known as Echostar 24, is being built by Maxar Technologies for Hughes Network Systems, a subsidiary of EchoStar. The satellite was scheduled to launch at the end of 2022, after initially being planned to launch mid-way through the year, but delays to several Maxar spacecraft, including Jupiter-3, mean that it is now likely to launch in early 2023.

A study on the night-time solar development titled "Thermoradiative Power Conversion from HgCdtTe Photodiodes and Their Current-Voltage Characteristics" has been published in the journal ACS Photonics.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) managed to generate electricity using the energy from heat radiated as infrared light. The device used to generate power is called a thermoradiative diode, a semiconductor device made from materials used in night-vision goggles. Stanford University researchers were able generate electricity with solar panels last month with similar methods.

The end of operations for NASA's InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) Mars lander is due at the end of this year as it continues to lose power.

Since landing on Mars on November 26th, 2018, to measure seismic activity, InSight has remained powered by a pair of solar panels, each measuring about 7 feet (2.2 meters) wide. Its primary science mission was to be achieved within a year on Mars (almost two years on Earth) and having completed it, NASA has extended its mission.

However, InSight's solar panels are slowly accumulating Martian dust on their surfaces, reducing their power output from around 5,000 watt-hours each Martian day (sol) when InSight landed to roughly 500 watt-hours per sol. The InSight team now estimates that it will become inoperative by December 2022. The team will put the lander's robotic arm into its resting position, known as the retirement pose, for the last time later in May.

Elon Musk has had bouts with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the past, and now he may be about to enter into the ring with them again following Musk's acquisition of Twitter.

In 2013 the SEC ruled that Twitter and other social media platforms are viable ways for publicly traded companies to disclose information that can affect share prices. In 2018, Elon Musk tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private, which caused Tesla's share price to skyrocket. The SEC went after Musk for his tweets which eventuated in Musk paying a $20 million fine, giving up his position as chairman of Tesla, and having information about Tesla pre-approved by colleagues at the company before publishing.

Now, an investor who has purchased more than 5% of a company's stock is forced to disclose their position within 10 days of the purchase. This SEC rule is put into place so other investors are aware that a potentially large investor has entered the scene and may be looking to gain a significant position or even take over. Musk waited 21 days to disclose his position of approximately 9.6%, which, when revealed, caused the price of Twitter's stock to skyrocket.

As reported yesterday, the US government conducted a public hearing with top military officials on UFOs, or as officials would prefer them to be called "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)".

During the hearing, which can be seen in full above, top Pentagon officials spoke to a House panel about UFO encounters and the risk they pose to national security. The hearing comes after a leaked military video of a UFO went viral, which eventuated into a large report on UFOs being released by the US military that stated the US had only tracked 144 encounters with UFOs.

However, there seem to be many more reports since then, as top Pentagon officials said during the hearing that the US military is "approximately 400" on record, a very sharp increase from the 144 recorded between 2004 and 2021. The spike in encounters can be attributed to the reduction in stigma attached to UFO sightings as a result of the 2021 report being released.

The first lunar eclipse of 2022 on the night of May 15th was the longest total lunar eclipse in 33 years.

The full moon spent approximately 85 minutes inside the Earth's umbra and shadow, compared to 96 minutes during a total lunar eclipse in August 1989. May's full moon is known as the Flower Moon, while the reddish appearance taken on by the moon during a total lunar eclipse due to light from the Sun bleeding around the Earth and landing on the moon earns it the moniker Blood Moon.

A Super Moon occurs when a full moon or new moon closely coincides with perigee, meaning the point in the moon's orbit at which it is closest to Earth, giving the moon a larger apparent size in the sky than normal. The culmination of these three factors has given this month's spectacular total lunar eclipse the mouthful of a name that is the Super Flower Blood Moon.

The Lockheed Martin X-59 QueSST (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) supersonic jet is being developed for NASA's Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator project.

Lockheed Martin's team at its Skunk Works facility is working with NASA to develop the experimental supersonic aircraft to address a persistent issue with supersonic flights; the sonic boom. A recent video posted to Lockheed Martin's YouTube channel features team members discussing testing and more on the journey to X-59's first flight.

The X-59 recently returned to Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, after critical ground tests over several months in Lockheed Martin's Ft. Worth facilities in Texas. The ground tests were conducted to ensure the aircraft could withstand the stresses of supersonic flight, meaning speeds of at least Mach 1. When exceeding the speed of sound (Mach 1), aircraft typically produce a loud sonic boom. However, the design of the X-59 is intended to reduce that to a quiet sonic "thump."

A study on the gene editing breakthrough titled "CRISPR-Cas9 editing of the arginine-vasopressin V1a receptor produces paradoxical changes in social behavior in Syrian hamsters" has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from Georgia State University used CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing technology to remove the expression of the Avpr1a receptor in Syrian hamsters. By removing the genes encoding for Avpr1a, the receptor is no longer made, and vasopressin, which normally binds to that receptor, can no longer influence the social behavior it typically regulates, such as pair bonding, cooperation, communication, dominance, and aggression.

Without the receptors, the hamsters showed higher social communication behavior levels than those with intact receptors. Typical differences in aggressiveness between male and female hamsters were also eliminated, with both displaying high levels of aggression towards members of the same sex.

In what feels like something ripped out of the future -- or maybe out of the multiverse -- Israel's Finance Ministry and the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) announced they will be testing a new project: an artificial intelligence (AI) floating (yes, floating) system that would generate electricity by tracking the sun.

The new AI-powered floating system is the work of a collaboration between Israeli company Xfloat, which made the system, and Mekorot national water company. The AI system will be floating above the reservoir water, tracking the sun and moving around for the absolute optimal results (power from the sun, onto its solar panels).

Xfloat has designed the system based on machine learning capabilities, sucking in that previous data over time, optimizing its performance continuously. Israel's Finance Ministry and the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) said that the system has a high power generation capacity and can handle environmental changes and extreme weather.

Elon Musk, the soon-to-be-owner of Twitter, has taken to his personal Twitter account to criticize the social media platforms algorithm.

The SpaceX and Tesla CEO wrote on May 15 that it's very important that Twitter users "fix your Twitter feed". Musk wrote that users are "being manipulated by the algorithm" in ways that the users are unaware of and that users will be able to notice the difference when switching between "Latest tweets" and Home Tweets.

Furthermore, Musk clarified that he isn't suggesting there is "malice in the algorithm", but rather how, under Home Tweets, the algorithm will attempt to show the user what they want to read, which "inadvertently manipulate/amplify your viewpoints without you realizing this is happening." Musk goes on to write that there are bugs in Twitter's code, and to solve these problems around trusting the algorithm, it needs to be made "open source".

Russia's space program recently launched the Angara-1 rocket carrying a "classified payload" to lower-Earth orbit.

According to space journalist Anatoly Zak who recently took to Twitter to announce that the Angara-1 rocket that was launched in April is carrying a "classified payload" that appears to be inactive, resulting in it eventually falling back down to Earth. According to Russian Space Web, on April 22, Russian authorities released several warnings to both air and sea traffic controllers that informed them there was to be a launch near the end of April.

The launch vehicle lifted off on April 29, and according to the publication, the initial launch went according to plan, but the classified military satellite it was carrying never performed any maneuvers to maintain its position in Earth's orbit. Notably, Russian officials inscribed the letter "Z" on the Angara rocket's payload fairing. The "Z" letter is commonly associated with showing support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Furthermore, "Z" has been spotted drawn on several Russian vehicles being used in the invasion.

NASA's InSight Mars Lander detected the Mars temblor, or marsquake, on May 4th, 2022, or Sol (Martian day) 1,222 of the lander's mission.

The marsquake clocked in at a magnitude 5 on moment magnitude scale that is used on Earth. The previous record-holder for largest marsquake measured was a magnitude-4.2, which the InSight Lander detected on August 25th, 2021, using its seismometer called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure.

A study on the algae-powered microprocessor titled "Powering a microprocessor by photosynthesis" has been published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

The widespread Synechocystis species of non-toxic, blue-green algae has been used by researchers to power a microprocessor by harnessing photosynthesis. The system is about the size of an AA battery, contains some water, and allows ambient light in to facilitate photosynthesis. Photosynthesis generates a small electric current that interacts with an aluminum electrode, in turn powering the microprocessor.

A study on the revived eyes titled "Revival of light signalling in the postmortem mouse and human retina" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers were able to revive function in cells from both mouse and human eyes obtained after death. Stimulating the postmortem retinas with light resulted in them emitting electrical signals known as b-waves, indicative of communication between cells, that are also emitted by living retinas.

NASA has created a new video showing 22 X-ray binary systems containing black holes.

An X-ray binary system hosts a normal star and a collapsed star, either a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. X-rays are produced from the system as the normal star has matter pulled off it by the gravity of the dense, collapsed star when they come close enough together.

NASA's new animation features 22 such systems throughout the Milky Way and its nearest neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Each contains a normal star and a confirmed black hole. However, the size of the black holes is illustrated according to their mass, and so they appear much larger than they would otherwise relative to their companion stars and the accretion disk made from matter pulled off them.

A study on logic gates titled "Light-field control of real and virtual charge carriers" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have developed a new kind of logic gate, the fundamental building block from which computers are made. Depending on the kind of logic gate and its rules, two inputs of any combination of 0 and 1 result in an output of either a 1 or 0. A single chip used in creating electronic components like processors and memory modules can contain billions of logic gates.

The newly developed logic gate, which demonstrates the viability of "lightwave electronics," works orders of magnitudes faster than traditional logic gates. Ordinary logic gates have an input processing delay on the order of nanoseconds, but the new logic gates process inputs in only femtoseconds, a million times shorter than nanoseconds.

NASA's Curiosity rover took the new image at the Greenheugh Pediment on Mars.

Curiosity captured the image with its Mast Camera (Mastcam) on Sol 3466 of its mission at 07:58:16 UTC on May 7th, 2022. The photo appears to feature a perfectly excavated doorway in the side of the Martian landscape. The above panorama image is a composite made from individual shots taken by Curiosity in the same area on the 3466th Martian day of its mission.

Reddit users have been quick to point out the spectacle is more likely a shear fracture, resulting when a strain in the rocks causes part of it to break off. Such a fracture may be due to temblors, or Marsquakes. Only days before the image was taken, on May 4th, 2022, NASA's Insight Mars Lander recorded a magnitude 5 Marsquake, the largest ever detected on the planet.

A study on the plants growing in lunar soil titled "Plants grown in Apollo lunar regolith present stress-associated transcriptomes that inform prospects for lunar exploration" has been published in the journal Communications Biology.

NASA astronauts collected the lunar soil from the moon during the Apollo 11 and 12 missions in 1969 and Apollo 17 in 1972. Only twelve grams of the soil was loaned to researchers from the University of Florida (UF) by NASA to experiment with after they applied multiple times to receive some. With such little material, their small-scale experiment involved growing seeds from the Arabidopsis plant in the lunar soil and Earthen soil for a control group.

The takers of the first-ever black hole photo have delivered on their promise of a massive announcement with the second-ever photo of a black hole.

The new photo is of the supermassive black hole at the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The image "provides overwhelming evidence" that Sagittarius A*, the center of the Milky Way galaxy, is indeed a black hole. The image was taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, who originally produced the first-ever photo of the M87* black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, taken in 2019.

Also known as Sgr A* for short, the center of the Milky Way was known to scientists as home to something very massive, compact, yet invisible. The black hole itself cannot be seen as it is completely dark. However, the glowing gas surrounding the dark shadow in the center of the image shows the bending of light by the strong gravitational forces of the black hole.

A study on the explosion titled "X-ray detection of a nova in the fireball phase" has been published in the journal Nature.

German astronomers have observed a white dwarf star explode with X-ray radiation for the first time. White dwarf stars arise when stars earlier in their life cycle, like our sun, use up all of their stellar fuel and shrink, becoming a dead stars. Such dead stars occasionally flare with explosions of radiation, but observing the first X-ray explosion from a white dwarf was "to some extent a fortunate coincidence."