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Category: space – Page 150

Astronomers discovered a mysterious gamma-ray feature outside our galaxy by analyzing 13 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

“It is a completely serendipitous discovery,” said Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, who presented the research at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. “We found a much stronger signal in a different part of the sky than the one we were looking for.”

The gamma-ray signal is unexpected and intriguingly similar to another unexplained feature produced by some of the most energetic cosmic particles ever detected. A paper describing the findings is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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WASHINGTON — SpaceWERX, the technology arm of the U.S. Space Force, is looking to award a new round of Small Business Innovation Research contracts worth up to $1.9 million each for IT infrastructure upgrades at the Eastern and Western launch ranges.

The project known as Digital Spaceport of the Future was announced earlier this month. SpaceWERX officials on Jan. 10 said launch ranges are in dire need of IT upgrades and are seeking proposals from the private sector by February 7.

Maj. Jareth Lamb, deputy director of SpaceWERX, said during a briefing that the contracts will be “direct to Phase 2” SBIR/STTR agreements. These are Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer deals that require collaboration between small businesses and non-profit research institutions.

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A team of astronomers including those from the University of Tokyo have created the first-ever map of magnetic field structures within a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Previous studies on galactic magnetic fields only gave a very general picture, but the new study reveals that magnetic fields in the spiral arms of our galaxy break away from this general picture significantly and are tilted away from the galactic average by a high degree.

The findings, appearing in The Astrophysical Journal, suggest magnetic fields strongly impact which means they played a part in the creation of our own solar system.

It might come as a surprise to some that magnetic fields can exist on scales larger than a planet. Most of our daily experience with magnetic fields involves either sticking things to our refrigerator, or perhaps using a compass to point north. The latter shows the existence of magnetic fields generated by our planet.

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Space coiling acoustic metamaterials are static and require manual reconfiguration for sound-field modulation. In a new report published in Communications Materials, Christabel Choi, and a team of scientists in computer science and engineering in the U.K., and Italy, developed an approach for active reconfiguration with standalone dynamics to space-coil unit cells known as dynamic meta-bricks.

The meta-bricks housed an actuatable, magnetorheological, elastomeric flap, to function like a switch and to directly regulate the transmitted ultrasound. The scientists showed the synergy between active and passive reconfigurability to develop multifunctional metamaterials with additional degrees of freedom, for design and implementation.

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Jan 10 (Reuters) — The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday demanded Yemen’s Houthis immediately end attacks on ships in the Red Sea and cautioned against escalating tensions while implicitly endorsing a U.S.-led task force that has been defending vessels.

The demand came in a Security Council resolution that also called on the Houthis to release the Galaxy Leader, a Japanese-operated vehicle carrier linked to an Israeli businessman that the group commandeered on Nov. 19, and its 25-person crew.

Eleven members voted for the measure demanding the Houthis “immediately cease all attacks, which impede global commerce and navigational rights and freedoms as well as regional peace.”

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has already gotten closer to the sun than any other human-made object. Yet, later this year, the star-skimming spacecraft will get even closer — all while traveling faster than its previous top speed.

The solar observatory — which, on Dec. 28, 2023, completed its 18th close flyby of the sun — will once again approach our star on Dec. 24, 2024. During this encounter, it will come within around 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the photosphere, which can be roughly considered the sun’s surface. (The sun is a ball of gas, so it doesn’t really have a surface.) To do so, the spacecraft will brave temperatures of around 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 degrees Celsius).

“We are basically almost landing on a star,” Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe mission, told BBC News. “This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the Moon landing of 1969.”

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Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it mildly, interstellar exploration is a very daunting task.

As Universe Today explored in a previous post, it would take between 19,000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Proxima Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology). On top of that, there are numerous risks when traveling through the interstellar medium (ISM), not all of which are well-understood.

Under the circumstances, gram-scale spacecraft that rely on directed-energy propulsion (AKA lasers) appear to be the only viable option for reaching neighboring stars in this century.

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NASA is working with private industry partners and small businesses under Artemis to produce scalable, affordable, and advanced laser communications systems that could enable greater exploration and discovery beyond Earth for the benefit of all.

Laser, or optical, communications provide missions with increased data rates – meaning that missions using laser technology can send and receive more information in a single transmission compared with those using traditional radio waves. When a spacecraft uses laser communications to send information, infrared light packs the data into tighter waves so ground stations on Earth can receive more data at once. Laser communications systems can provide 10 to 100 times higher data rates than the radio systems used by space missions today.

As science instruments evolve to capture high-definition data, missions will need expedited ways to transmit information to Earth. It would take roughly nine weeks to transmit a complete map of Mars back to Earth with current radio frequency systems. With lasers, it would only take about nine days.

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A research team at Osaka Metropolitan University has fabricated a gallium nitride (GaN) transistor using diamond, which of all natural materials has the highest thermal conductivity on earth, as a substrate, and they succeeded in increasing heat dissipation by more than 2X compared with conventional transistors. The transistor is expected to be useful not only in the fields of 5G communication base stations, weather radar, and satellite communications, but also in microwave heating and plasma processing.

Researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University are proving that diamonds are so much more than just a ‘girl’s best friend.’ Their groundbreaking research focuses on gallium nitride (GaN) transistors, which are high-power, high-frequency semiconductor devices used in mobile data and satellite communication systems.

With the increasing miniaturization of semiconductor devices, problems arise such as increases in power density and heat generation that can affect the performance, reliability, and lifetime of these devices.

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