Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 91

Have you ever wondered what a bullet from a 9mm would look like flying through an egg? The Slow Motion Guys have captured that in staggering amounts of frames per second.

In a new video released to The Slow Mo Guys YouTube channel, Gav and Dan revisit a video that was uploaded to the channel 11 years ago where Gav demonstrated the difference in frames rates by writing on the mugs and shooting at the respective numbers. The highest frame rate in that 11 year old video was 10,000, and is where the egg shooting video begins with the maximum recorded frame rate being 1 million frames per second (FPS).

The eggs are positioned in the same location and a 9mm bullet is fired. The slow motion camera records the impact and each level of frame rate showed revealed different aspects of the collision. At the higher frame rates the bullets wobble from piercing through the egg can be more clearly seen, and moving into the 100,000's of FPS smaller pieces of shell can be seen as well as the shadow from the shockwave of air.

Canada passed laws on April 28th, 2022, allowing crimes committed on the moon to be prosecuted.

An amendment to Canada's Criminal Code to allow the change passed with members of parliament voting 181 to 144 in favor. The nation had already expanded its jurisdiction to include the International Space Station (ISS), allowing it to prosecute Canadian astronauts who committed crimes aboard it. Consequently, crimes committed on either the ISS or on the moon will be treated the same as those committed in Canada.

The amendment comes alongside increasing space flights year after year and ahead of NASA's crewed Artemis II to the moon, which will see astronauts return to the moon for the first time in over half a century, and that will include a Canadian astronaut on the journey.

SpaceX's President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), Gwynne Shotwell, made the prediction on CNBC in a recent interview.

Shotwell believes that astronauts will land on the surface of Mars before the end of the 2020s, likely by taking SpaceX's Starship, which features heavily in the company's plans for Mars. Starship is currently committed to several moon missions once it becomes operational following its upcoming orbital flight test should it pass the Federal Aviation Administration's environmental assessment.

The hypersonic missile prototype has been developed by Lockheed Martin for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The prototype is being developed as part of DARPA's Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) program. Lockheed Martin's prototype's recent free flight test is the second such test conducted for the program. The first test was conducted in September, 2021, by Raytheon Technologies, according to a DARPA press release.

According to DARPA's latest press release, "air-breathing vehicles utilize air captured from the atmosphere to achieve sustained propulsion." Lockheed Martin's test saw the missile prototype reach and maintain a cruising speed of greater than Mach 5, or over five times the speed of sound, "for an extended period of time." It reached altitudes of over 65,000 feet (12.3 miles, 19.8 kilometers) and flew for more than 300 nautical miles (345 miles, 555.6 kilometers).

A study on the reversal of aging hallmarks titled "Fecal microbiota transfer between young and aged mice reverses hallmarks of the aging gut, eye, and brain" has been published in the journal Microbiome.

Researchers transplanted fecal microbes from young mice into old mice and saw the reversal of key aging hallmarks in their guts, eyes, and brains. Conversely, transplanting fecal microbes from older mice into young mice accelerated these hallmarks, increasing inflammation in the brain and reducing the production of key proteins such as those required for vision.

In a new report from the New York Times, a man who received a pig heart transplant has died with traces of an animal virus.

57-year-old David Bennett Sr lived for two months after receiving his genetically modified pig heart, and according to surgeons who performed the first-of-its-kind procedure, the man's body didn't reject the organ, nor was there any evidence to say that the Bennett developed an active infection with a virus following the completion of the transplant.

Bennett died on March 8, and according to Dr. Bartley Griffith of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, traces of a virus that is known to infect pigs was found in Bennett. Notably, Griffith says that the traces of animal virus may have impacted Bennett's condition, and contributed towards his sudden decline in health.

In a recent interview with David Mayman, the founder of the company behind the flying motorcycle, he explained why the new way of transportation has been created and the goal behind it.

Mayman sat down for an interview with Futurism, where he was asked several questions about the flying motorcycle named Speeder. Mayman explained that the Speeder isn't for the everyday driver, and isn't technically a flying motorcycle, as he believes the design has pivoted away from the traditional concept of a flying motorcycle. Notably, Mayman said that Speeder is primarily aimed at the emergency response and disaster relief, but that doesn't mean there won't be any recreational use.

The founder of JetPack Aviation explained that a Speeder could be used to provide emergency response relief to an area hit by a hurricane that has caused extreme damage to roads and trails. The Speeder would be able to fly over all of the damaged roads, even in 40-50 mph winds. Furthermore, the Speeder is capable of reaching 15,000 feet in altitude, but Mayman says that the only time that kind of altitude is reached is when the Speeder is already in a location with terrain that has a high altitude.

The National Solar Observatory (NSO) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have released telescope and satellite views of the latest solar eclipse.

The partial solar eclipse on April 30th was viewable only from the Southern Hemisphere, in parts of Antarctica, South America, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. However, NOAA satellites were also able to view the event from space. NOAA's GOES-16 satellite captured the moon passing in front of the sun, while its GOES-East satellite spotted the moon's shadow passing over Earth.

Some ground-based telescopes also caught the event, such as the National Science Foundation's Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) telescope at their NOIRLab Cerro Tololo site located in Chile. The next eclipse is due on May 15th, when May's full moon, known as the Flower Moon, will undergo a total lunar eclipse. After that, another solar eclipse is due on October 25th, 2022.

To celebrate Black Hole Week, NASA has shared a fact about the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy and how it has a "leak".

NASA explains that at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy is a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4.1 million Suns called Sagittarius A. In the space agency's blog post, NASA writes that black holes draw in material into what is called an accretion disk. Sometimes when some of the material swirling around the black hole falls inside, it's "swept up into outflowing jets that are collimated by the black hole's powerful magnetic fields. The narrow "searchlight beams" are accompanied by a flood of deadly ionizing radiation."

Gerald Cecil of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill was able to prove through multiple wavelength observations that the central black hole is "currently powered down" but can sometimes burp or hiccup out mini-jets when it consumes something large such as a gas cloud or an entire star. NASA explains in the below video that observations from Hubble have revealed that the jet is still pushing feebly into a hydrogen cloud, which causes bubbles that can expand as far as 500 light-years.

A group of scientists believes that the compounds found in lunar soil may be able to provide astronauts exploring the surface with oxygen and potentially fuel.

In a new paper published in the journal Jule, a team of scientists analyzed lunar samples obtained by China's Chang'e 5 spacecraft and now plan to develop a system capable of extracting oxygen from the lunar soil. The process is called "extraterrestrial photosynthesis" and includes developing a system that uses solar radiation and lunar soil to electrolyze water from the moon, creating oxygen and hydrogen.

Notably, the scientists also propose that carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts could be combined with hydrogen from the water electrolysis to produce hydrocarbons such as methane. Methane could then be used as fuel, proposed the researchers.

A team of scientists has uncovered fossils of a 33 ft apex predator dinosaur, breaking records in its appropriate category.

A team of Argentinian paleontologists has announced the discovery of what is now considered the largest Megaraptor on Earth today. The newly discovered Apex Predator has been detailed in a new study published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. The dinosaur's scientific name is "Maip macrothorax", and the dinosaur is described in the report as being the "shadow of the death" that "kills with cold wind" throughout the Andes mountains.

The now largest Megaraptor measured around 33 ft in length and featured two sharp curved claws per front paw, each of the talons extended 15.7 inches in length. The researchers write in the study that during its time, Maip's would have fed on smaller dinosaurs slashing at them with its long talons and digging into their torsos to withdraw intestines. Maip's are estimated to have lived about 70 million years ago, nearing the end of the Cretaceous period, and according to researchers, the species went extinct about 66 million years ago, making it one of the last megaraptors to roam Earth.

Lunar samples taken on the Apollo 17 missions from 1972 are finally being studied.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has received the samples after being transported from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they were brought to and stored in a freezer in December 1972 after Apollo 17 astronauts returned to Earth.

The samples were consolidated at Goddard over four years as researchers from Johnson began designing and retrofitting a facility where the samples could be processed. The samples are being studied as part of the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA) to produce research to aid the upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon's South Pole.

A study on the binary system titled "A 62-minute orbital period black widow binary in a wide hierarchical triple" has been published in the journal Nature.

MIT astronomers have detected a "black widow binary" star system candidate approximately 3,000 light years from Earth, named ZTF J1406+1222. The star system comprises a pulsar (a rapidly spinning neutron star) and a smaller companion star that the pulsar is slowly consuming, like its namesake, the black widow spider, does to its mate.

Two dozen other black widow binaries have been observed throughout the Milky Way. However, this candidate is unique in that it appears to have a third star associated with the system, circling the two inner stars from afar every 10,000 years. The inner pair of stars also has the shortest orbital period of any known black widow binary, circling each other every 62 minutes.

A study on the Moon titled "Distribution of water phase near the poles of the Moon from gravity aspects" has been published in the journal Nature.

Water has been found on the Moon, and some of this lunar water likely originated from asteroid and comet collisions that brought water to it. However, a new study suggests that another water source is from the Earth itself, up to as much as 3,500 cubic kilometers (840 cubic miles) of it.

Hydrogen and oxygen ions in Earth's upper atmosphere may have passed over to the Moon as the Moon passes through the tail of Earth's magnetosphere for five days out of every lunar month. Solar wind from the Sun breaks the magnetic field lines on one side of Earth, creating the magnetotail the Moon passes through to pick up these ions.

Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov was interviewed by Russian news outlet Moskovskii Komsomolets to explain his retirement.

Skvortsov explained that a culmination of factors has led to his decision to retire from the space program, such as his age, and that there isn't a lot of interesting work to keep him busy on the International Space Station (ISS). Therefore, continuing to work aboard the space station would see him working alongside American astronauts, which he has "no proper motivation" to do.

Boeing's Starliner has had another worrying hiccup on its final stretch to launch.

The Starliner spacecraft is making its way to the Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for its second attempt at launching to the International Space Station (ISS). However, in an awkward turn of events, a protective window cover fell off the spacecraft as it made its way there.

Boeing confirmed to William Harwood of CBS that a window cover did indeed fall off, but there is no problem with the spacecraft, and its second unpiloted Orbital Flight Test (OFT-2) is still set to go ahead. OFT-2 is planned to launch at 22:54 UTC on May 19th with docking at the ISS expected for around 11:07 UTC the next day.

US lawmakers are receiving secret briefings on the progress the US military is making in uncovering the origins of mysterious, highly advanced aircraft violating protected airspace.

According to a new report from Politico, members of the Senate Intelligence and Armed Service committees have received classified reports showing the progress the Pentagon and other agencies have made on investigating UFOs reports. The news comes from three people that have direct knowledge of the situation, according to Politico.

An aide of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is a member of both the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, said under anonymity that Gillibrand "believes that the DoD needs to take this issue much more seriously and get in motion. They have had ample time to implement these important provisions, and they need to show us that they are prepared to address this issue in the long-term."

On April 27th, 2022, a fireball into the Earth's atmosphere over southern Mississippi and caused a sonic boom that was heard by dozens.

NASA confirmed the existence of a space rock estimated to be approximately a foot in diameter and entered Earth's atmosphere about 54 miles above the Mississippi River near the town of Alcorn. The space rock was estimated to be traveling at around 55,000 miles per hour, and throughout its journey, it began disintegrating with fragments of it breaking off before it finally exploded.

Previously, NASA estimated that as the meteor heated up, it generated the same amount of energy as 3 tons of TNT. Furthermore, NASA said that this generation of energy created shock waves that propagated to the ground and produced sonic booms/vibrations that were felt by many.

NASA has recorded the Sun releasing a powerful solar flare that officials have categorized as the most intense class of solar flare.

NASA has taken to its blog to detail a strong solar flare that occurred on May 3rd, 2022. the flare happened at 9:25 a.m. EDT and was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which constantly watches the Sun for any events such as these. As explained by the space agency, solar flares are strong, powerful bursts of energy that can certainly have an impact on Earth, depending on the intensity.

Solar flares can impact radio communications, electric power grids, and GPS satellites. Additionally, flares and coronal mass ejections from the Sun can also pose a danger to spacecrafts and astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Notably, officials at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said the flare that was recorded on May 3rd was classified as an x-class flare, the most intense categorization for a solar flare.

NASA is planning on using the Moon as a launchpad to go to Mars and will be setting up a temporary presence on the surface of the Moon.

In a recent interview with NASA associate administrator Bob Cabana, the space agency discussed the process of landing on the surface of the Moon while maintaining the goal of eventually reaching Mars. Cabana was asked what a "sustainable" presence on the Moon looks like and replied that the goal isn't necessarily about "permanently staying there with a specific set of people for a long period of time."

"We don't want to get stuck on the Moon. We wanna learn what we need to know in order to be able to move onto Mars," added Cabana. To achieve these goals, NASA is planning on launching the Lunar Gateway project and the Human Landing System with SpaceX. The idea behind these projects, and others, is eventually to establish a reliable commercial presence between the lunar surface and Earth, which will act as a launchpad for developing appropriate technology, and space travel understanding that will lead to achieving the ultimate goal of reaching Mars.