Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 97

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has released a report summarizing the threats from the nations to the United States' satellites.

The report asserts that China and Russia are both developing and deploying anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) while simultaneously increasing the size of their intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) spacecraft. These potential threats to the U.S. help determine how the Pentagon's defense budget is allocated, specifically for the U.S. Space Force (USSF) and U.S. Space Command (USSPACECOM).

China has almost doubled its ISR fleet since 2018 to over 250 systems as of January 2022, which is a number only second to those operated by the United States. Russia is allegedly "pursuing counterspace systems to neutralize or deny U.S. space-based services." Russia may add to its several "ground-based lasers that can blind satellite sensors" with "higher-power systems that extend the threat to the structures of all satellites, not just electro-optical" by 2030.

A study on the black hole titled "A dusty compact object bridging galaxies and quasars at cosmic dawn" has been published in Nature.

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data to identify a black hole growing into a supermassive black hole while the universe was only 750 million years old. They found the black hole forming inside a galaxy from the early days of the universe called GNz7q, marking the first observation of a black hole growing inside such a galaxy.

GNz7q has qualities of both starburst galaxies and quasars but lacks some features usually associated with the latter. The black hole at its center is still growing, and it appears to be a precursor to the kinds of supermassive black holes and accompanying quasars observed elsewhere in the universe.

Vladimir Putin has named his next target while simultaneously shielding his people from the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

The announcement from Russian President Vladimir Putin came during his visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a Russian spaceport located in the far east of Russia. As reported by The Moscow Times, Putin stated that Russia needs to rebuild its "moon program".

The Russian president added that the Luna 25 mission, a planned uncrewed lunar lander mission scheduled to launch in August 2022, will be completed by the third quarter of this year. At this time, Putin directed a question to the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, asking, "Are we going to make it in time in the third quarter?"

Moondust collected by NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission was recently sold at an auction as a part of a Space History Sale.

The moondust is a part of the first lunar samples collected by astronaut Neil Armstrong, according to NASA. The samples were auctioned off by Bonhams, which originally estimated that the moondust would be worth anywhere between $800,000 to $1.2 million. However, at the Space History Sale held on Wednesday in New York, the very small amount of microscopic moon dust sold for $504,375, falling very short of what Bonhams expected.

When Bonhams received the lunar samples, it was unable to verify the total weight due to the fineness of the dust. Eventually, Bonhams cited the dust in microns and that the dust was actually found in the seams of a bag that was used to transport the original lunar samples that were collected in 1969.

An unconfirmed video that has appeared on some news outlets suggests that Russia is moving military equipment to the Finland border.

The footage is unverified by Ukraine officials but shows Russian military vehicles on the move, which Newsweek reports to be K-300P Bastion-Ps, coastal defense missile systems. The video was uploaded by the Twitter user OSINTdefender spans 43-seconds, and the individual filming makes sure to showcase the nearby street sign that is directions to Helsinki, the capital of Finland.

Since the video is unverified, some people are speculating that it could be Russian propaganda deliberately released by the Kremlin. Finland declared independence from Russia in 1917 and is now preparing to make a historic decision to join NATO "before midsummer", a move that Russia has warned Finland against doing while also suggesting there will be some level of consequences if Finland follows through.

Russia is currently attacking a key piece of Ukraine's space infrastructure, according to a recent report from NBC.

The report from NBC quotes the US Space Force, which says it's possible that Russia has positioned jammers around Ukraine that are interrupting the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites regularly used for navigation and mapping. Notably, the jammers aren't targeting the satellites in space, but the devices used to receive the data, preventing them from receiving any usable signal.

Furthermore, David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, spoke to NBC and said that at the moment, Russia hasn't attacked any satellites in low-Earth orbit, but officials are monitoring the region for such a situation to unfold. Additionally, some areas in Ukraine are suffering from an internet shortage despite SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's generous donation of Starlink satellites.

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.

The clinical trials the company has conducted thus far have improved participants' speech perception; their ability to recognize words and understand speech. The first clinical study resulted in statistically significant improvements from only a single injection in some participants, in some cases lasting nearly two years. Three separate clinical studies have resulted in meaningful improvements in over 200 patients.

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.

Data from four million W boson candidates found during experiments with the Tevatron particle accelerator were analyzed by over 400 scientists for more than a decade since the Tevatron stopped operating in 2011. They determined the W boson's mass with a precision of 0.01 percent, double the precision of previous efforts. Their results show the mass of the W boson differs from the mass predicted by the Standard Model by seven standard deviations.

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 papers are dated between 1980 and 2020 and originated from 56 hospitals (12 of which were military) across 33 cities in 15 provinces. Three hundred forty-eight surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, and other staff were listed as authors on the papers. The new study writes that "our findings strongly suggest that physicians in the People's Republic of China have participated in executions by organ removal."

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 progression of the brain starts with rapid growth in the early stages of life and slowly shrinks later on as we age, with this new study showing how different parts of the brain grow differently. Gray matter volume increases at a rapid rate before age six and slows down afterward, while white matter growth peaks just before age 29.

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."