Lifeboat Foundation

In December 2019, the United States established its new space force: the United States Space Force. A logical step in a globalized and digitized world whose infrastructure depends on satellites in space. This infrastructure is under threat. Also by a resurgence of conflict between East and West. This episode of Spacetime describes how the military conquered space and why the world is in a new arms race in Earth orbit.

#documentary #spacetime #usa.

Continue reading “SPACE FORCE: The Secret Orbit — Arms Race in Space | SpaceTime — WELT Documentary” »

A NASA-led research team used satellite imagery and artificial intelligence methods to map billions of discrete tree crowns down to a 50-cm scale. The images encompassed a large swath of arid northern Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Allometric equations based on previous tree sampling allowed the researchers to convert imagery into estimates of tree wood, foliage, root size, and carbon sequestration.

The new NASA estimation, published in the journal Nature, was surprisingly low. While the typical estimation of a region’s carbon stock might rely on counting small areas and extrapolating results upwards, the NASA demonstrated technique only counts the trees that are actually there, down to the individual tree. Jules Bayala and Meine van Noordwijk published a News & Views article in the same journal commenting on the NASA team’s work.

Continue reading “NASA captures sequestered carbon of 9.9 billion trees with deep-learning and satellite images” »

A statically generated blog example using Next.js and WordPress.

ALGORITHMS TURN PHOTO SHAPSHOTS INTO 3D VIDEO AND OR IMMERSIVE SPACE. This has been termed “Neural Radiance Fields.” Now Google Maps wants to turn Google Maps into a gigantic 3D space. Three videos below demonstrate the method. 1) A simple demonstration, 2) Google’s immersive maps, and 3) Using this principle to make dark, grainy photographs clear and immersive.

This technique is different from “time of flight” cameras which make a 3D snapshot based on the time light takes to travel to and from objects, but combined with this technology, and with a constellation of microsatellites as large as cell phones, a new version of “Google Earth” with live, continual imaging of the whole planet could eventually be envisioned.

Continue reading “NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images” »

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is an all-sky survey mission that will discover thousands of exoplanets around nearby bright stars. TESS launched April 18, 2018 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

- and Yes TESS found a second exoplanet like Earth over 60 million light years away. A link about it is in this one.

The new Starlink satellites are a precursor for larger models that will eventually launch aboard Starship.

SpaceX lifted the first batch of its new Starlink “V2 mini” satellites to orbit on Monday, February 27. The private space firm launched 21 of the new generation satellites aboard a Falcon 9 rocket that also came down to perform the 100th successful booster landing in a row for the company.

The Starlink mission took to the skies at 6:13 pm EST (2313 GMT) from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch was delayed roughly five hours before liftoff due to “a space weather concern,” SpaceX explained on Twitter.

Continue reading “SpaceX launches batch of 21 new ‘V2 mini’ Starlink satellites to orbit” »

However, these ones are different to the several thousand Starlink satellites that are already circling Earth.

That’s because they sport a more modern and powerful design that gives them four times the capacity for serving customers compared to the original design, SpaceX said. So, yes, it means faster internet speeds for customers.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk confirmed the successful deployment of the new satellites in a tweet.

Yesterday was an example of how things are speeding up at SpaceX. First, they had a launch scrubbed due to problems with its lighter fluid then they had a launch scrubbed due to weather. Then they had a launch delayed due to space weather. Finally, the delayed launch did get off the ground. The point being that SpaceX is so busy these days that even with two scrubs and one delay, they still launched to orbit!

This launch featured the first Starlink 2.0 satellites. Besides a 4 times increase in capacity compared to version 1.5 satellites, they also include brand new ion engines which are the first ion engines to use argon that have ever been produced.

Finally, this launch ended in the 100th successful landing in a row for SpaceX. Almost no other space company has completed 100 successful launches, forget about landings! (Currently everyone else is crashing and burning all their orbital rockets.)

Continue reading “SpaceX: Our Second-Gen Starlink Satellites Have 4 Times More Capacity” »

The RNA molecule is commonly recognized as messenger between DNA and protein, but it can also be folded into intricate molecular machines. An example of a naturally occurring RNA machine is the ribosome, that functions as a protein factory in all cells.

Inspired by natural RNA machines, researchers at the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO) have developed a method called “RNA origami,” which makes it possible to design artificial RNA nanostructures that fold from a single stand of RNA. The method is inspired by the Japanese paper folding art, origami, where a single piece of paper can be folded into a given shape, such as a paper bird.

The research paper in Nature Nanotechnology describes how the RNA origami technique was used to design RNA nanostructures, that were characterized by cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM) at the Danish National cryo-EM Facility EMBION. Cryo-EM is a method for determining the 3D structure of biomolecules, which works by freezing the sample so quickly that water does not have time to form ice crystals, which means that frozen biomolecules can be observed more clearly with the electron microscope.