Two space agencies say we need filter systems for drinking moon water, and they need the public’s help with the AquaLunar challenge.
Category: space – Page 147
The latest star maps are rewriting the story of our Milky Way, revealing a much more tumultuous history than astronomers suspected.
Japanese toy manufacturer Takara Tomy developed the lunar rover, SORA-Q, in association with JAXA, Sony Group, and Doshisha University.
Innovative offering
The creative minds at JAXA’s design department faced the challenge of developing a compact and lightweight lunar probe capable of accompanying the main lander to the moon. Simultaneously, they aimed for a design that would be straightforward and durable enough to operate effectively on the uneven lunar terrain. To find innovative solutions, they sought inspiration from an unexpected source: a company known for crafting toys.
The OpenDAC project is a collaborative research project between Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) at Meta and Georgia Tech, aimed at significantly reducing the cost of Direct Air Capture (DAC).
Direct Air Capture (DAC) involves directly capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and has been widely recognized as a crucial tool in combating climate change. Despite its potential, the broad implementation of DAC has been impeded by high capture costs. Central to overcoming this hurdle is the discovery of novel sorbents — materials that pull carbon dioxide from the air. Discovering new sorbents holds the key to reducing capture costs and scaling DAC to meaningfully impact global carbon emissions.
The DAC space is growing rapidly with many companies entering the space. To engage the broader research community as well as the budding DAC industry, we have released the OpenDAC 2023 (ODAC23) dataset to train ML models. ODAC23 contains nearly 40M DFT calculations from 170K DFT relaxations involving Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) with carbon dioxide and water adsorbates. We have also released baseline ML models trained on this dataset.
The young sun may have captured several Mars-or Mercury-size exoplanets that now orbit in the outer reaches of the solar system, but identifying them will be extremely challenging.
Astronomers accidentally uncovered an extremely dark primordial galaxy — one of the faintest objects in the universe — because of a typo in their telescope coordinates.
The US and China are racing to be the first to put a man on the moon in the 21st Century, but NASA last week announced delays to its crewed missions.
The oxygen bottleneck for technospheres
Posted in space
On Earth, technological advances required open-air combustion, which needs an oxygen partial pressure of about 18%. This threshold can help guide searches for detectable technospheres on other planets.
New observations at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility offer vital insights into energetic ions in fusion plasmas, key for fusion power development and space plasma understanding, with implications for satellite technology.
In a burning plasma, maintaining confinement of fusion-produced energetic ions is essential to producing energy. These fusion plasmas host a wide array of electromagnetic waves that can push energetic ions out of the plasma. This reduces the heating of the plasma from fusion reaction products and ends the burning plasma state.
Recent measurements at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility provide the first direct observations of energetic ions moving through space and energy in a tokamak. Researchers combined these measurements with advanced computer models of electromagnetic waves and how they interact with energetic ions. The results provide an improved understanding of the interplay between plasma waves and energetic ions in fusion plasmas.