Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 92

NASA plans to eventually transport samples from its Perseverance mission currently being conducted on the red planet back to Earth.

While the effort of landing, acquiring, and transporting Martian samples back to Earth for scientific study has been years in the making, there are scientists that are concerned that the samples may contain alien germs. Peter Doran, a geologist at Louisiana State University, explained that there is a very low chance that the samples will contain any form of life, "but there is a possibility".

To combat the concerns from researchers around the world about potential contamination NASA is proposing to hold a public meeting that asks for feedback on its Mars retrieval mission. At the moment, the space agency's current plan to transport Mars samples back to Earth involves launching the samples from the surface of Mars into orbit, where they will be collected by another spacecraft and transported back to our blue planet for analysis. Additionally, NASA will be sterilizing any surface that the Mars samples have touched.

NASA's Perseverance Rover landed on the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021, and since then, it has been exploring the red planet and its barren yet interesting wasteland.

Master has recently published a set of images captured by the small Mars helicopter named Ingenuity. The small helicopter is used as a scout, and as explained by the Perseverance team, the helicopter is used to reach places Perseverance wouldn't usually go and to scout ahead for possible routes that are favorable to the rover.

Images captured on April 23 were from engineer Ingenuity's 27th flight. The small helicopter was able to capture images of a martian ridgeline that the NASA team has called Fortun Ridge. Notably, the Ridgeline is of scientific significance how's the geological feature indicates a boundary between two major rock units.

On April 15th, the US 18th Space Defence Squadron announced that there were an additional 16 pieces of space debris being trapped in low earth orbit.

The new space debris was tracked back to object #32398, which was discovered to be an ullage motor that was used to transport three Russian satellites into orbit back in 2007. These ullage motors are used to correctly position the parent rocket's fuel before the engine is restarted in orbit. These rockets were created to push the fuel down once the rocket has entered orbit as there is no gravity, as explained by Astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.

At the moment, there are 64 of these ullage motors floating around in Earth's orbit. Notably, the 18th space defense Squadron confirmed the break up of SL-12 R/B, adding that they are tracking the additional 16 pieces of space debris and that there is an ongoing analysis. Furthermore, the European Space Agency believes that there are about 36000 individual pieces of space debris larger than 4 inches in width currently in low Earth orbit.

A study on the echoing black holes titled "The NICER "Reverberation Machine": A Systematic Study of Time Lags in Black Hole X-Ray Binaries" has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Stellar-mass black holes are formed when a star collapses and range from five to several tens of solar masses. Astronomers have estimated that our Milky Way galaxy could contain around 100 million stellar-mass black holes. Of these, many are inactive and effectively invisible. Those that are active can be detected by the light bouncing off the material surrounding the black hole consuming it.

Echoes of light bouncing around these black holes have been discovered in eight new examples by astronomers, adding to the two that had been previously identified in the Milky Way. The echos are generated when the accretion disk made from the dust and gas feeding the black hole flairs brightly with light which is then reflected back.

A study on potential alien life titled "The Number of Possible CETIs within Our Galaxy and the Communication Probability among These CETIs" has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Researchers have estimated that the time humanity will have to survive to hear from any Communicating Extraterrestrial Intelligent Civilizations (CETIs) is about 400,000 years. A 2020 study has estimated that the Milky Way houses about 36 CETIs, whereas simulations run by the authors of the latest paper estimate between as high as almost 43,000 and as low as about 111.

A study on the plastic waste titled "Quantification and evaluation of plastic waste in the United States" has been published in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling.

The United States Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has estimated that in 2019, the country sent an average of $7.2 billion worth of plastic to landfills. It has also been estimated that though the upfront cost of setting up recycling systems may cost more in the short term than cheaply disposing of plastic waste in landfills, a circular plastic economy could save between $4.5 billion and $9.9 billion.

The NREL estimates that plastic waste in the United States amounts to 44 million metric tons. A different methodology used by the Environmental Protection Agency estimates the amount to be 32.2 million metric tons. New recycling techniques would provide incentives to create a circular economy, reclaiming billions of dollars and the embodied energy of the waste plastics, the amount of energy used to manufacture them, equating to about 12% of the energy consumption of the country's industrial sector.

A study on the new superconductor titled "The field-free Josephson diode in a van der Waals heterostructure" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have discovered one-way superconductivity without needing magnetic fields. This was thought to be impossible since 1911, when superconductivity was discovered, and the new discovery helps pave the way to a future of superconducting computing. To enable one-way superconductivity, they created the Josephson Diode, an example of what they call a Quantum Material Josephson Junctions (QMJJ).

Electronics can become hundreds of times faster and use less energy with the help of superconductors, which allow current to travel through a wire without any resistance. Unidirectional energy flow is a prerequisite for computing to be possible and for modern electronics to function properly, and it was previously impossible for scientists to achieve with superconductivity.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) restarted for the first time in three years almost two weeks ago.

The LHC restarted on April 22nd after three years of maintenance, upgrades, and consolidation work. Three days later, it broke its own record for the energy of its beams. Two proton beams were circulated throughout the particle accelerator with an energy of 6.8 trillion electronvolts per beam, exceeding the previous record set in 2015 at 6.5 TeV.

CERN achieved the record-setting run during its beam commissioning phase as the LHC prepares to begin its third major run of experiments, known as Run 3. CERN plans to slowly ramp up the energy of runs in anticipation of the beginning of Run 3 in the summer and is planning to achieve a record energy of 13.6 TeV.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has posted a new video to its YouTube channel as part of its Cosmic Kiss mission.

The video is sped up by eight times and shows astronauts from Expedition 66 floating throughout the inside of the International Space Station (ISS) as it receives an orbital reboost. The ISS is periodically reboosted to help it maintain its orbit, as it loses about 100 meters of altitude every day due to atmospheric drag.

In March 2022, a reboost was performed with the help of Russia's ISS Progress 70 cargo craft, firing its engines for several minutes until it returned the station to its proper altitude. At the correct altitude, phasing for visiting vehicles in the future is optimized for when they arrive.

Rocket Lab has successfully caught its Electron rocket booster as it fell back to Earth during its latest mission.

A week prior, the company successfully retrieved a dummy booster meant to simulate the real Electron booster in preparation for the upcoming mission. On May 3rd, Rocket Lab recovered its Electron booster with its modified Sikorsky S-92 helicopter during the "There and Back Again" mission.

Rocket Lab's Electron rocket launched 34 satellites for various companies to a sun-synchronous orbit, marking 146 satellites launched by Electron so far. About 15 minutes after launch (52:30 in the company's livestream), Rocket Lab's helicopter caught the rocket's booster in mid-air as it parachuted back to Earth.

A study on the universe shrinking titled "Rapidly descending dark energy and the end of cosmic expansion" has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have created a new model that uses dark energy, the mysterious force that appears to be driving the ever-faster expansion of the universe that has been previously observed. Their model considers dark energy not to be constant but instead decaying over time. This would result in the expansive force from the dark energy waning with time, eventually halting the universe's expansion.

The team's model estimates that within the 65 million years, the universe could stop expanding at an accelerating rate, and then within 100 million years, it could stop expanding entirely. At this stage, the universe would then begin to contract slowly over billions of years. With the universe's current age at 13.77 billion years old, this would see it begin to shrink before its 14 billionth birthday.

The tensions between Russia and the rest of the space venturing countries have seemingly come to an all-time high after Russia confirmed it would be departing from the International Space Station (ISS).

The news comes from Roscosmos director and chief Dmitry Rogozin, who said to the state-owned Rossiya-24 TV channel on April 30 that Russia's involvement with the ISS project will soon come to a close but not prematurely. The head of Russia's space agency said that Roscosmos would maintain previous agreements with nations and give at least one year's notice "in accordance with our obligations".

As LiveScience points out, analysts that have researched Russia's actions in space have found that Russia never agreed to partake in the ISS project further than 2024. Notably, other partners in the ISS program, such as NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have pledged to extend the project's life to at least 2030. Rogozin has long been vocal about the sanctions imposed on Russia following the kremlins invasion, saying that the international restrictions on Russia would "destroy" the partnership between NASA and the ESA.

It's hard to understand just how truly big something is without seeing it, or at least having something to compare it to.

Understanding how large objects can be in space is a common problem for some people and a truly understandable one to have as our brains struggle to create an accurate representation of a planet that has a diameter of millions of miles. This is why scale is very important in trying to accurately represent the size of an object, and when combining that with a little bit of animation, you get a video that can change the way you view our solar system.

Planetary astronomer James O'Donoghue from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) recently tweeted out a video showcasing objects within the solar system and their relative size to each other. The video begins with the Ceres dwarf planet and shows the moon, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and finally our massive star we call the Sun. As pointed out by ScienceAlert, even if you know the approximate size of the planets in our solar system, the size of Saturn, Jupiter, and the Sun is still shocking.

A few days ago, NASA reminded everyone that the first solar eclipse of 2022 was inbound and was going to be a partial solar eclipse.

The solar eclipse phenomenon happens when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, causing the moon to appear as a black ball in the sky taking chunks out of the Sun that is millions of miles behind it. 2022's first solar eclipse occurred on April 30 at 2:45 pm, and Southern Hemisphere skywatchers in regions such as South America, Antarctica, and the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were able to gaze upon the sight for about four hours.

During the partial solar eclipse, only a small portion of the Sun was obscured by the moon's orbit, and the viewer's location would also impact the severity of the obscurity. Notably, at 4:41 pm EDT, the moon blacked out about 64% if the Sun for viewers located near the southern tip of South America. The next partial solar eclipse is scheduled to happen on October 25 and will be visible over Europe, western Asia, and northeast Africa.

A new study has confirmed that on some asteroids, the seeds of life are present, which means life could have been brought to Earth and not developed on the planet.

The quest to find the origin of life has been one scientists and researchers have been progressing in for many years, and now a newly published study hopes to fill a gap in that research. The new paper published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications journal explains that all living things have DNA and RNA, and DNA and RNA are made up of five information components named nucleobases.

A team of researchers that consisted of scientists from Japan and the US studied three carbonaceous meteorites that fell to the surface of Earth in Australia, the US, and Canada. The researchers were able to discover two new nucleobases in the meteorites, cytosine, and thymine. Previously researchers were only able to discover three out of the five components, meaning this research has put the last puzzle piece in place.

A "fictosexual" man in Japan married a hologram of the pop singer of his dreams four years ago now, but he's no longer happy with her... as he can't communicate with his wife.

Japanese newspaper The Mainichi talked with Akihiko Kondo, who said he had reached a technical roadblock with Hatsune Miku after the company that made, and provides the AI and hologram to communicate with her was no longer providing him with the service.

Kondo said: "It's not that people can't live in society because they're engrossed in a two-dimensional world, but rather, there are cases where people become captivated as they search for a place for themselves in video games and anime, because reality is too painful for them. I was one of those people".

The West Japan Rail Company (or JR West) unveiled its Gundam-style heavy equipment robot for carrying out repairs.

The robot takes on the appearance of a humanoid upper body mounted on the end of a hydraulic crane arm, which rides around on the rail system atop a specially braced rail car. The rail car can deploy stabilizing legs when it arrives at its destination along the line, allowing the robot to manipulate heavy equipment around the rail system instead of workers "to improve productivity and safety."

The robot is controlled by a human pilot wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset. Motion tracking allows the pilot to turn their head and have the robot turn its head accordingly while streaming what it sees to the pilot. The pilot also controls the robot's arms and hands with a pair of handles, and if an external force moves the robot's arms, that motion will feed back into the pilot's grips.

Researchers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) will be presenting new information about the Milky Way in about two weeks.

The presentation will feature results from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project that brought the world the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019. The EHT has since been studying Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the galactic center of the Milky Way galaxy, and an astronomical radio source, an object in space that emits strong radio waves.

Sgr A* is believed to be a supermassive black hole, and confirmation of such could comprise part of the upcoming presentation. A press conference from the project's findings will be hosted on May 12th, 2022, at 15:00 CEST (13:00 UTC), which will be live-streamed on the ESO's YouTube channel. Following that, a live Q&A event will be hosted on the same channel for the public to query a panel of EHT experts.

A new project status update from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reveals SpaceX's Starship will have to wait a while longer to get off the ground.

SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy Launch Vehicle Program has been awaiting the finalization of the FAA's Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) in order to conduct its first orbital test flight. The draft of the PEA was first published for review on September 17th, 2021, and after multiple delays will now be finalized no sooner than May 31st, 2022.

To conduct Starship and Super Heavy launch operations, SpaceX had to apply for and obtain permits and licenses from the FAA to operate such a vehicle. In order to grant such permits and licenses, the FAA has to conduct a review of "public safety issues," "national security or foreign policy concerns," "insurance requirements for the launch operator," and "potential environmental impact."

SpaceX has taken to its Twitter account to share new footage of the Dragon capsule firing its thrusters towards the International Space Station (ISS).

The video displays numerous of the Crew Dragon spacecraft's Draco thrusters, as mentioned by SpaceX in the posts caption. The Crew Dragon capsule carried four astronauts to the ISS as part of NASA and SpaceX's Crew-4 mission that launched on Wednesday, April 27 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Dragon capsule also transported cargo to the ISS and one piece of cargo was a genetic seed bank containing DNA samples from various species and humans. The Crew-4 mission marks SpaceX's sixth time it has taken a crewed mission into orbit and the fourth crewed mission to the ISS. Notably, the Dragon capsule is capable of autonomously navigating itself to dock with the ISS, meaning the astronauts onboard can sit back and enjoy the truly incredible ride.