Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 97

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reached Mars on in 2006 and was tasked with studying the Red Planet's geology and climate.

While the orbiter has done a great job at observing Mars' geology from a distance, it has also been put to other uses. NASA has pointed the HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera at the surface of Mars to spot the two newest members on Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover and martian helicopter Ingenuity, which together landed in early 2021.

The images taken by NASA's orbiter showcase a top-down view of Perseverance exploring the cracked surface of a rock formation called "Maaz", which translates from Navajo to English as "Mars". Located around 650 feet to the left of Perseverance is Ingenuity calmly seated on martian bedrock. Recently, Perseverance stumbled upon its own parachute and snapped some images that one Twitter user keenly caught. More on that story can be found here.

NASA has confirmed that the largest comet ever observed has a diameter of about 85 miles and is now officially the largest comet ever seen after observations from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The comet is C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB)) and was originally discovered in 2014 by two astronomers, Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, through archived images from the Dark Energy Survey. Previous estimates for the size of BB were anywhere between 62 and 124 miles, but now NASA has pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the comet and confirmed the diameter of its nucleus to be 85 miles across.

NASA writes on its blog that BB has beaten the previous record-holder comet C/2002 VQ94 which has an estimated nucleus of 60 miles across. The space agency explains that the comet has been hurling toward Earth for 1 million years now and won't pose any threat to Earth when it makes its approach in 2031, where it won't come within a billion miles of Earth, or about the distance to Saturn.

Frequency Therapeutics, the biotechnology company responsible for the new treatment, was founded in part by scientists from MIT.

The company's approach uses regenerative therapy rather than hearing aids or implants to return hearing to those with hearing loss. Frequency has designed a drug candidate that can be injected into the ear to regenerate progenitor cells within the cochlea, which are cells that come from stem cells and are used to create the hair cells that enable hearing.

A study on the new measurement titled "High-precision measurement of the W boson mass with the CDF II detector" has been published in the journal Science.

The W boson is an elementary particle, a fundamental building block of all matter in the universe, which governs the weak force, one of four fundamental forces in nature (the others being the strong force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force). The Standard Model of particle physics describes these elementary particles, but new experiments have shown the mass of the W boson is significantly greater than previously thought.

NASA has announced it achieved a major milestone in gathering data on Earth's climate through its GEDI mission.

The space agency took to its blog and social media channels to announce the release of a new data product from the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), which provides what NASA calls the "first near-global estimate of aboveground forest biomass and the carbon it stores". On NASA's blog, the space agency explains that climate researchers will be able to access the data product and plug in their regions of query to study forest structure and carbon content with increased precision.

GEDI is equipped to the International Space Station (ISS) and is specifically designed to measure Earth's vegetation by creating 3D maps with data acquired by shooting laser pulses at the trees and land below it. NASA writes that the results GEDI has acquired have compared nicely to the forest inventories listed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis data.

Officials have confirmed that on the surface of the sun, a dead sunspot has exploded, causing a large amount of plasma to be hurled into space.

According to SpaceWeather.com, on April 11, the "corpse" of the sunspot called AR2987 exploded and released a large amount of radiation, which was then followed by a coronal mass ejection (CME), an ejection of solar material or plasma. A sunspot is caused by contortions in the sun's interior magnetic field, much like a rubber band that has been stretched and released. These solar flares launch large amounts of radiation into space in all directions and are often followed by a CME, which is a large concentrated wave of charged particles.

Solar flares reach Earth within 7 minutes, while CMEs usually take about three days to reach Earth. When a CME impacts Earth, the charged particles interact with Earth's oxygen and nitrogen-rich atmosphere it assists in the creation of auroras that are commonly known as the Northern and Southern Lights. Furthermore, if powerful enough, the CME can cause interruptions for GPS coordinates, high-frequency radio degradation, and even impact electric grids.

NASA has taken to its blog and social channels to announce the date of the first solar eclipse of 2022 and where it can be seen.

The space agency explains that on April 30, 2022, at 2:45 p.m. EDT the first solar eclipse of 2022 will happen and will be visible across parts of the Antarctic, the southern tip of South America the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The solar eclipse will reach its maximum at 4:41 p.m. EDT and will end at 6:37 p.m. EDT. So, what is a solar eclipse exactly?

NASA explains that a solar eclipse happens when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun. A shadow is cast on the Earth during a solar eclipse, and in the coming instance, on April 30, there will be a maximum of 54% of the sun covered by the moon, making this solar eclipse a "partial solar eclipse". The April 30 solar eclipse is the first of two solar eclipses expected to happen in 2022, with the second being on October 25.

The United States government has confirmed that an object from interstellar space has crashed into Earth, confirming a theory by two Harvard astronomers.

The confirmation comes from US Space Command, which comes under the Department of Defense and was created to be responsible for military operations in outer space. The US Space Command took to its Twitter account to reveal a previously classified memo that confirms a meteor that was seen off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014 was of interstellar origin and now the first interstellar object to have reached Earth.

The two Harvard scientists, theoretical astrophysicist Amir Siraj and his mentor Avi Loeb identified the space rock three years ago, and according to Siraj, it was very difficult to get any information from the US government on the space rocks velocity, etc as it was all classified. The researchers penned a paper that has been awaiting peer review and sent it to The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The paper remains yet to be published but ended up making its way to Joel Mozer, chief scientist of Space Operations Command at the US Space Force.

There is much that researchers don't know about the moon, but every day scientists are taking steps toward developing a deeper understanding of its history.

A team of researchers are attempting to answer one of the biggest questions about the moon, why is the far side of the moon so different from the near side? According to a new study recently published in the journal Science Advances, the difference in the moon's front and back may have been caused by a massive asteroid impact that happened billions of years ago during the moon's early development.

The study's lead author Matt Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, said that researchers know that a large asteroid impact caused the South Pole-Aitken, a colossal impact crater on the far side of the moon that measures around 1,553 miles in diameter and between 3.8 and 5 miles deep. The impact from this asteroid would have generated a lot of heat that the researchers say affected the moon's interior dynamics.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than 30 years now, and despite its age, it still manages to shock onlookers with the images it can produce.

NASA and the European Space Agency's Hubble Space Telescope has been used to photograph a spiral galaxy that is relatively close when speaking on astronomical terms. The spiral galaxy is known as NGC 5921 and resides approximately 80 million light-years from Earth within the constellation Serpens.

NASA has taken to its blog to explain that the galaxy NGC 5921 has long serpentine spiral arms and is similar to our own Milky Way galaxy as it contains a central linear band of stars. The space agency explains that this bar plays a role in how parent galaxies produce stars and impacts the motion of stars within the region. NASA writes that around half of all spiral galaxies contain bars. The above image was partly captured by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and observations conducted by the ground-based Gemini Observatory.

A study on the organ harvesting titled "Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China" has been published in the American Journal of Transplantation.

Researchers from Australia and Israel used computational text analyses to conduct a forensic review of 2,838 papers from a dataset containing 124,770 Chinese-language transplant publications. In 71 different papers, brain death was not properly declared before organ removal, where it is concluded that "removal of the heart during organ procurement must have been the proximate cause of the donor's death."

The strange orb was spotted in the sky around 5 a.m. local time in Alaska on March 29th.

The glowing orb was spotted moving through the sky amongst the northern lights by an automatic camera trap, operated by The Aurora Chasers, Ronn Murray and Marketa Murray, in Fairbanks, Alaska. The orb moved from the northeast to the southwest, appearing much larger than a full moon in the sky, with Fairbanks residents saying, "it seemed like it had something that was spinning inside it."

They also said the orb was taking its time to move across the sky gradually instead of shooting across. The camera trap takes photos every 45 seconds, with the orb appearing in six photos, indicating the orb was visible for at least four and a half minutes.

A study on the new brain map titled "Brain charts for the human lifespan" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers pooled a combined 123,984 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from 101,457 individuals, with participant ages ranging from a 16-week-old fetus to a 100-year-old adult, to create a comprehensive look at how the brain changes during our lives. The scans were collected from over a hundred previous studies and standardized for comparison in a database you can view here.

The Andromeda galaxy is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way, and eventually, it will collide with our galaxy to form one large galaxy.

The collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way won't happen for around 5 billion years, so until then, we can still stand in awe at the beauty of the cosmos captured in various types of images. Recently, amateur astrophotographer Brennan Gilmore took to Reddit to share his image of Andromeda, saying that he had "finally taken a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy I'm proud of". The image blew up on Reddit, receiving more than 85,000 upvotes and numerous awards.

Gilmore explains that he began doing astrophotography in July 2020 throughout the pandemic lockdown. The above image was taken with a four-inch telescope over multiple nights in his backyard near Charlottesville, Virginia, US. Within the Reddit post, Gilmore writes that there are about 24 million pixels within the image when viewed in its full resolution and around one-trillion stars within the Andromeda Galaxy. "This means there is somewhere in the neighborhood of 21,000 stars per pixel in the galactic glow."

NASA has announced that the first fully private space tourism group has successfully arrived at the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA has been posting on its social media channels and its blog about the Axiom Mission 1, which features the first fully private space tourism mission that will take four individuals to the ISS. The four private astronauts are Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy. The four now-astronauts took SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule to the floating laboratory and opened the hatch doors to be greeted by the ISS crew at 10:13 AM EDT on April 9.

The space agency explains that the Ax1 mission marks the beginning of a new era of space exploration that will pave the way forward for the commercialization of low-Earth orbit and enable more people to participate in space missions. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that the Ax1 mission is "more proof of what has become increasingly clear: This is the golden era of commercial spaceflight."

A study on the problem titled "Detection of microplastics in human lung tissue using μFTIR spectroscopy" has been published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time only last month. Thirty-nine microplastic particles have now been found in 11 of 13 lung tissue samples taken from living humans. Samples taken from cadavers and lung cancer patients have previously revealed microplastics in human lungs.

The microplastics from these samples were detected throughout the lungs and found in higher concentrations as the samples were taken from lower down in the lungs. The particles came from at least a dozen different sources, including polyethylene, resin, and nylon.

A study on the new viruses titled "Cryptic and abundant marine viruses at the evolutionary origins of Earth's RNA virome" has been published in the journal Science.

An international research team has used machine-learning analyses paired with traditional evolutionary trees to identify the 5,500 new RNA virus species from ocean water samples. The collection represents all five known RNA virus phyla and suggests the need for at least five new phyla to be created to classify them, where phyla refers to the taxonomical classification one level below kingdom.

The largest group within the collection belong to the proposed Taraviricota phylum. The four other proposed phyla are Pomiviricota, Paraxenoviricota, Wamoviricota, and Arctiviricota. The same research team was responsible for growing the number of known DNA virsues in the ocean from a few thousand in 2015 to two hundred thousand in 2019.

Studies on the galaxy titled "A Search for H-Dropout Lyman Break Galaxies at z~12-16" and "Are the Newly-Discovered z∼13 Drop-out Sources Starburst Galaxies or Quasars?" have been published in the Astrophysical Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, respectively.

Researchers have spotted HD1, a galaxy candidate approximately 13.5 billion light-years away from Earth. Two theories have been suggested regarding HD1; that it could be forming stars at a very high rate, potentially Population III stars (the first stars to be born in the universe, which have yet to be observed), or that HD1 may contain a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our Sun.

Researchers have claimed that they have excavated a fossil of a dinosaur that died on the same day the asteroid that hit Earth and ended the time of the dinosaurs.

According to researchers led by Robert DePalma, a doctoral student at the University of Manchester, the fossilized dinosaur leg that was discovered is from a Thescelosaurus, a herbivore dinosaur that's name translates to "wonderful lizard" in ancient Greek. The dinosaur leg was found to have its skin attached to it, and according to researchers, there was no previous record of what the skin of the Thescelosaurus looked like before this discovery.

The team of researchers claims that the dinosaur's leg had been ripped off and buried during the asteroid impact that ended the dinosaurs' reign on Earth and created what has now been named the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan Peninsula. Notably, Robert DePalma in 2019 reported finding fossilized fish that still had gills attached to them.

NASA's Perseverance rover landed on the Red Planet in February 2021, and since then, it has been exploring the Jezero Crater.

Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, and has since spent 414 days on Mars conducting science and taking images. The rover has ventured quite the distance and has taken several core samples of Martian rocks that will eventually be transported back to Earth. On April 6, the rover snapped some images of the terrain that surrounds it, and one hawk-eyed Twitter user identified what seems to be Perseverance's parachute in the background of one of the images.

The remains of the parachute, along with its exact location, were identified by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter back in 2021, and according to reports, the location of the parachute is only half a mile south of Perseverance's current location, which means it may be possible that Perseverance's mast cam has enough perch to spot the year-old relic.